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MAN AND THE EARTH 



MAN 

AND THE EARTH 


BY 


NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 

*1 


PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY IN 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
1910 










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Copyright, 1905, 

By Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. 


1?* 


Published November, 1905 


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The University Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 








PREFACE 


I N this book I have endeavored to set forth certain 
reasons why there should be a change in the 
point of view from which we commonly regard 
the resources of the earth. As a teacher of Geology, 
I have seen that there is a complete lack of under¬ 
standing in our communities as to the duty we owe 
to our successors in their use of these limited re¬ 
sources. In this regard our conduct is like that of 
children who take the good that comes to them with 
no thought of the hereafter. This attitude of men as 
regards the future of the material values of the earth 
notably contrasts with that they hold to the moral 
and political future of their kind. A large part of 
their thought and endeavor goes to that group of 
problems, but practically none at all to the immedi¬ 
ate questions that relate to the material foundations 
on which all the higher development of the life of 
their kind has to rest. It is with some hope of 
directing attention to this neglected field of inquiry 
that I have written this book. 

It will, perhaps, be noted that the statements con¬ 
cerning the mineral and other material resources of 
the earth are not supported by statistics set forth in 


VI 


Preface 

these pages. They thus lack the apparent authority 
which such a presentation would have given them. It 
would have been a matter of no great difficulty to 
have carried out my original plan and to have filled 
many pages with such matter. The truth is, however, 
that although the earth’s stores of value to men 
can be estimated in general terms there is as yet no 
sufficient basis for accurate quantitative reckonings. 
Thus while we can clearly foresee that the store 
of coal is certain to be so far exhausted within two 
or three centuries that it will have no considerable 
place in the arts, we cannot estimate the amount of 
this fuel with anything like statistical accuracy. Thus 
it is that the statements in this book should be taken 
as the judgments of an observer who has endeavored 
to inform himself as to the resources of the earth of 
value to men, who is confident that in the general 
terms in which these opinions are stated they have 
value as guides to conduct. 

Several of the chapters of this book, in all about 
one-fourth of the whole, have been published in the 
“ International Quarterly.” I am indebted to Mr. 
Richardson, the editor of that journal, for permission 
to repeat them substantially in the form in which 
they there appeared. 

N. S. S. 

Cambridge, Mass. 

October , 190 5. 


CONTENTS 

Page 

I Earth and Man . i 

II The Future of Power.20 

III The Exhaustion of the Metals . . 42 

IV The Unwon Lands.69 

V Land from the Waters.87 

VI The Problem of the Nile.101 

VII The Maintenance of the Soil . . . 120 

VIII The Resources of the Sea .... 139 

IX The Changes to Come in the Human 

Period.150 

X The Beauty of the Earth .... 172 

XI The Future of Nature upon the 

Earth.190 

XII The Last of Earth and Man . . . 209 
XIII The Attitude of Man to the Earth 

— Summary and Conclusions . . 228 
Index.235 
























MAN AND THE EARTH 


i 

EARTH AND MAN 


T HE situation of man with reference to the 
material resources of the earth deserves more 
attention than has been given to it. Here and 
there students of the mineral deposits of certain coun¬ 
tries, especially those of Great Britain, have computed 
the amounts of coal and iron within limited fields and 
estimated the probable time when those stores would 
be exhausted; but a general account of the tax that 
civilization makes on the fields it occupies and a fore¬ 
cast as to their endurance of the present and prospec¬ 
tive demand on them is lacking. It is evident that 
such a fore-looking should be one of the first results 
of high culture. We may be sure that those who look 
back upon us and our deeds from the centuries to come 
will remark upon the manner in which we use our heri¬ 
tage, and theirs, as we are now doing, in the spend¬ 
thrift’s way, with no care for those to come. They 
will date the end of barbarism from the time when 
the generations began to feel that they rightfully had 
no more than a life estate in this sphere, with no right 
to squander the inheritance of their kind. 


2 


Man and the Earth 


To see our position with reference to the resources 
of the earth it is well to begin by noting the fact that 
the lower animals, and primitive men as well, make 
no drain on its stores. They do not lessen the amount 
of soil or take from the minerals of the under-earth: 
in a small way they enrich it by their simple lives, for 
their forms are contributed to that store of chemically 
organized matter which serves the needs of those that 
come after them. With the first step upward, however, 
and ever in increasing measure as he mounts toward 
civilization, man becomes a spoiler. As soon as he 
attains the grade of a hunter he begins to disturb the 
balance of the life about him and in time he attains such 
success in the art that he exterminates the larger, and 
therefore the rarer, beasts. Thus when our genus 
homo comes into view, elephants of various species 
existed in considerable numbers in all the continents 
except Australia. Its first large accomplishment ap¬ 
pears to have consisted in the extermination of these 
noble beasts in the Americas, in Europe, and in north¬ 
ern Asia. There is no historic record of this work, 
but the disappearance of the elephants can be well 
explained only by the supposition that they went down 
before the assault of vigorous men, as has been the 
case with many other species of large land animals. 

So long as men remained in the estate of the hunter 
the damage they could do was limited to the destruc¬ 
tion of the larger beasts and the birds, such as the 
moa, that could not fly. Prolific species, even of con¬ 
siderable size, such as the bisons, if they were nimble 


Earth and Man 


3 

and combative, seem to have been able to hold the field 
against the attacks of primitive hunters. While in this 
station the tribes of men are never very numerous, for 
their wars, famines, and sorceries prevent their increase, 
which, under the most favorable conditions, is never 
rapid among savages. As soon, however, as stone im¬ 
plements begin to be replaced by those of metal, man 
begins to draw upon the limited stores of the under¬ 
earth, and with each advance in his arts the demand 
becomes the greater. In the first centuries of the iron 
age the requisition was much less than a pound each 
year for each person. Four centuries ago it probably 
did not exceed, even in the most civilized countries, 
ten pounds per capita each year. It appears to have 
been at something like that rate when the English 
colonies were founded in North Amerca. At the pres¬ 
ent time, in the United States, it is at the average rate 
of about five hundred pounds per annum for every 
man, woman, and child in the land, and the demand 
is increasing with startling rapidity. It seems emi¬ 
nently probable that before the end of the present cen¬ 
tury, unless checked by a great advancement of cost, 
it will require a ton of iron each year to meet the pro¬ 
gressive desires of this insatiable man. 

Of the other long-used metals and other earth re¬ 
sources the increase in consumption is, with slight 
exceptions, as notable as in the case of iron; within 
a generation, mainly because of the use of the metal in 
electrical work, the need of copper has augmented 
even more rapidly than that of iron and the gain in the 


4 


Man and the Earth 


requirements is going on with exceeding speed. So, 
too, the demand for the other base metals long in use, 
zinc and tin, has been in nowise lessened by the more 
extended use of iron and copper; they are ever finding 
new places in the arts and a larger demand in the 
markets. As regards the so-called noble metals, silver 
and gold, the demand from the beginning has not 
been distinctly related to use, but to unlimited desire. 
Men have always wrested all they could of them from 
the earth or from each other, with little reference to 
the profit they won in the process. There has been 
of late something like a halt in the production of sil¬ 
ver, except when it comes as a by-product, because it 
has generally been abandoned as a standard of value; 
but taken together the production of these precious 
metals has in modern times increased about as rapidly 
as that of iron. It is likely, however, that they will in 
time become of no economic importance. 

As regards the earth’s resources in the way of fuel — 
coal, oil, wood, petroleum, and peat — the history of 
the modern increase in demand is as evident and menac¬ 
ing as in the case of the metals. When the American 
English colonies were founded, coal had hardly begun 
to come into use in any country. It is doubtful if the 
output of the world amounted at that time to one hun¬ 
dred thousand tons, possibly to not more per capita 
of the folk in Europe than a pound, or about the same 
as iron at that late period in the so-called “ iron age.” 
At the present time the total production of Europe and 
North America amounts to an average of at least two 


Earth and Man 


5 

tons per each unit of the population, and the increase 
goes on at a high ratio. Petroleum, practically un¬ 
known to the Occidental peoples until about half a 
century ago, has, with wonderful rapidity, become a 
necessity to all civilized and many barbaric peoples; 
the increase in the rate of consumption is swifter than 
that of any other earth product. Timber and peat, the 
primitive resources for light and heat, are the only 
earth products for which the demand has not greatly 
extended in modern times; it appears, indeed, to have 
shrunk in most civilized countries with the cheapening 
and diffusion of coal, due to the lessened cost of min¬ 
ing and of transportation. 

The increase in the tax of the earth’s resources is 
seen also in the very great number of substances which 
were unknown to the ancients, or disregarded by them, 
but which now find a large place in our arts. A com¬ 
parison of the demands of three centuries ago with 
those of our day is interesting. In, say, 1600, when 
men were very much alive to the question of what 
they could gain, there were only about twenty sub¬ 
stances, other than precious stones, for which they 
looked to the underground realm. Clays for the pot¬ 
ter and bricklayer, whetstones and millstones, iron, 
copper, tin, gold, silver, lead, sand for glass, mica, 
coal, peat, salt, and mercury make , up all the important 
elements of this list. At the present time, we more or 
less seriously depend on what is below the ground for 
several hundred substances or their immediate deriv¬ 
atives which find a place in our arts. Petroleum 


6 


Man and the Earth 


alone has afforded the basis of far more earth products 
than were in use at the time of the discovery of 
America. It gives us a large number of dyes and a 
host of medicines. It is indeed likely that the products 
immediately derived from the mineral oils exceed all 
those obtained from the earth at the time of Columbus 
— and each year brings additions to the demand. 

The advance in needs of dynamic power, in modern 
times, has been even greater than in ponderable things. 
Even two centuries ago, the energy available for man’s 
work was mainly limited to that obtained from domes¬ 
ticated animals. The wind served in a small measure 
through the sails of ships and of windmills, and there 
were water-wheels, but the average amount of energy 
at his service was certainly less than one horse-power 
per capita. At the present time it may safely be 
reckoned that in the United States and in Euro¬ 
pean countries on a similar economic basis, the average 
amount is at least ten times as great, and the present 
rate of increase quite as high as in the case of mineral 
resources. It is true, that, so far as water is concerned, 
this increase in the demand for energy in the arts does 
not come as a tax on the store of the under-earth, as 
it is obtained through solar energy which would other¬ 
wise be dissipated in space. But the use of falling 
water as a source of power, though rapidly increasing, 
does not keep pace with that of coal, which is obtained 
from a store which is in process of rapid exhaustion, 
one that cannot be relied on for more than a few hun¬ 
dred years to come: — if the world keeps the rate of 


“Earth and Man 


7 

consumption with which it enters the twentieth cen¬ 
tury it will be exhausted before the twenty-third. 

The problem of the underground store of wealth, 
though as we shall see on more detailed examination it 
is very serious, is not so immediate or menacing as 
that afforded by the question of food supply. As far 
as man is concerned, the supply has to come from two 
sources — the tilled soil and the waters, especially the 
sea. While it is possible by a widely extended sys¬ 
tem of fish culture greatly to increase the amount of 
food derived from the waters, experience does not war¬ 
rant the supposition that the supply from this source 
can be manifolded. The life of the oceans, as of the 
primeval lands, fe already packed to the utmost point. 
We cannot hope to double the number of edible fishes 
without reducing the number of their enemies or of 
the other creatures which compete with them for sub¬ 
sistence. Neither of these things can we at present see 
the way to do. It is to the soil, to the tilled soil alone, 
that we are to look for the body of the food that is to 
feed man for all the time he abides on this sphere. 

In the life below man the relation of the creatures to 
the soil had been beautifully adjusted. The plants, 
by associated action, formed on all the land surfaces, ex¬ 
cept in very arid regions, a mat of roots and stems 
which served to defend the slowly decaying rock 
against the attack of the rain-water. This adjustment 
is so perfect that in a country bearing its primeval 
vegetation the eroding of the soil is essentially limited 
to what is brought about by the dissolving action of the 


8 


Man and the Earth 


water which creeps through the earth and there takes 
the substances of the rocks into solution; very little 
goes away, in suspension, in the form of mud. In these 
conditions the slowly decaying rock passes very grad¬ 
ually to the sea; for a long time it bides in the soil 
layer where, with the advance in its decomposition, it 
affords the mineral substances needed by the plants that 
protect it. Thus until man disturbs the conditions of 
forest and prairie the soils tend to become deep and 
rich, affording the best possible sustenance to the plants 
which feed in them. In their normal state they repre¬ 
sent the preserved waste of hundreds, or it may be, 
thousands of feet of rocks which have gradually worn 
down by being dissolved in the rain-water that creeps 
through them. 

As soon as agriculture begins, the ancient order of 
the soils is subverted. In order to give his domes¬ 
ticated plants a chance to grow, the soil-tiller has to 
break up the ancient protective mantle of plants, which 
through ages of natural selection became adjusted 
to their task, and to expose the ground to the destruc¬ 
tive action of the rain. How great this is may be 
judged by inspecting any newly ploughed field after a 
heavy rain. If the surface has been smoothed by 
the roller, we may note that where a potsherd or a 
flat pebble has protected the soil it rests on top of a 
little column of earth, the surrounding material having 
been washed away to the streams where it flows onward 
to the sea. A single heavy rainstorm may lower the 
surface of a tilled field to the amount of an inch, a 


Earth and Man 


9 

greater waste than would, on the average, be brought 
about in natural conditions in four or five centuries. 
The result is that in any valley in which the soils are 
subjected to an ordinary destructive tillage the de¬ 
portation of the material goes on far more rapidly than 
their restoration by the decay of the underlying rocks. 
Except for the alluvial plains whereupon the flood 
waters lay down the waste of fields of the upper 
country, nearly all parts of the arable lands which have 
been long subjected to the plough are thinned so that 
they retain only a part of their original food-yielding 
capacity. Moreover, the process of cropping takes 
away the soluble minerals more rapidly than they are 
prepared, so that there is a double waste in body and 
in the chemical materials needed by the food-giving 
plants. 

There is no question that the wasting of soils under 
usual tillage conditions constitutes a very menacing 
evil. Whoever will go, with his eyes open to the mat¬ 
ter, about the lands bordering on the Mediterranean, 
will see almost everywhere the result of this process. 
Besides the general pauperizing of the soils, he will find 
great areas where the fields have prevailingly steep 
slopes from which the rains have stripped away the coat¬ 
ing down to the bed-rock. In Italy, Greece, and Spain, 
this damage has gone so far that the food-producing 
capacity of those countries has been greatly reduced 
since they were first subjected to general tillage. There 
is no basis for an accurate reckoning, but it seems 
likely from several local estimates that the average 


io Man and the Earth 

loss of tillage value of the region about the Mediter¬ 
ranean exceeds one-third of what it was originally. In 
sundry parts of the United States, especially in the 
hilly country of Virginia and Kentucky, the depth and 
fertility of the soil has in about one hundred and fifty 
years been shorn away in like great measure. Except 
in a few regions, as in England and Belgium, where the 
declivities are prevailingly gentle, it may be said that 
the tilled land of the world exhibits a steadfast reduc¬ 
tion in those features which give it value to man. Even 
when the substance of the soil remains in unimpaired 
thickness, as in the so-called prairie lands of the Miss¬ 
issippi valley, the progressive decrease on the average 
returns to cropping shows that the impoverishment is 
steadfastly going on. 

In considering the struggle which men have to make 
in the time to come in order to maintain the food¬ 
giving value of the earth, it is well to keep in mind the 
fact that the battle is with one of the inevitables — with 
gravitation, which urges everything ponderable down 
into the sea. What we know as soil is rock material 
on its way to the deep, but considerably restrained in 
its going by the action of the plants which form a mat 
upon it. All the materials which go into solution 
naturally pass in that state on the same way; thus what¬ 
ever we do, we cannot expect to effect anything more 
than a retardation of the process to that point where 
the decay of the bed-rocks will effectively restrain the 
wasting process, so that the loss may be made good. 
It is indeed not desirable to arrest this passage of earth 


Earth and Man 


11 

material to the sea. So far as that passage is here and 
there effected by natural processes we find that, in time, 
the soil loses its fertility because the necessary mineral 
constituents are exhausted. Thus in the case of the 
coal-beds, the swamp-bottoms in which the plants grew 
did not have their materials renewed by the decay of 
the underlying rock and so were in time exhausted by 
the drain upon them and became too unfertile to main¬ 
tain vegetation. The preservation of the food-giving 
value of the soil as used by civilized man depends on the 
efficiency of the means by which he keeps the passage 
of the soil to the sea at a rate no greater than that 
at which it is restored by the decay of the materials on 
which it rests. 

Some of those who have essayed a forecast of the 
future of man have felt that the prospect was shadowed 
by a doubt as to his permanence. Seeing, as we do, 
that the life of this earth is characteristically temporary, 
the species of any geological period rarely enduring to 
the next, it is a natural conclusion that our own kind 
will share the fate of others, and, in a geological sense 
of the word, soon pass away. Closer attention to the 
matter leads us to believe that the genus homo is one 
of those exceptional groups, of which there are many, 
which have a peculiar capacity for withstanding those 
influences which bring about the death of species. 
There are a number of such forms in most of the 
classes of animals, creatures which have existed, it 
may be, from palaeozoic times, perhaps for fifty or 
more million years, so little changed that the earliest 


12 Man and the Earth 

of them seem as nearly akin to the latest as are the 
diverse species of mankind. Man has been upon the 
earth certainly for two geological periods. He with¬ 
stood the colossal accident of the last glacial epoch. 
He is by his intellectual quality exempted from most 
of the agents that destroy organic groups. So we 
may fairly reckon that he is not to pass from the earth 
in all foreseeable time, but is to master it and himself 
for ages of far-reaching endeavor. The limits set to 
him are not those set by the death of his species, but 
by the endurance of the earth to the demands his pro¬ 
gressive desires make upon it. 

We have already glanced at certain of these limita¬ 
tions in the future development of man in the extent 
of his present and increasing demands on the resources 
of the soil and the under-earth; before going further, 
let us consider what is the probable number of men 
that will have to be provided for, say, within three 
centuries to come — a future as remote as the past of 
our American history. At the present time the 
human population of the earth is somewhat variously 
estimated at from thirteen to sixteen hundred millions, 
for the reason that the reckoning of the number in 
China and Africa is uncertain. It is most likely near 
the higher of those figures. The gain in three cen¬ 
turies has probably been at an average rate of near a 
million a year, and, at the present time, is very much 
greater. So far as we can see, this increase has been 
altogether among the peoples who have attained to the 
condition of civilization, with the consequent partial 


Earth and Man 


1 3 

exemption from pestilences and the evils of chronic 
war. 

As the control of modern conditions extends, either 
by the spontaneous development in the retarded peo¬ 
ples, as in China, or by the conqueror’s hand, as in 
India and Egypt, we may reckon that the rate of this 
growth in population will increase. There is indeed 
danger that with Africa and China modernized, the rate 
will, by the end of the present century, be many times 
as great as it is at present. In a word, we may estimate 
that in a historic sense very soon the world will be near 
its food-producing limit. As to the numbers of our 
genus who will be demanding subsistence at the time 
when the ultimate of the earth’s sustaining capacity is 
attained, no very precise determination can be made, 
yet a fair general idea of it may be had by considering 
the existing conditions in certain of the best-known 
regions. Thus in Europe it is evident that an increase 
of one-half in the existing total cannot be accomplished 
without a great and practically inconceivable reduc¬ 
tion in the standards of life of the people. The evi¬ 
dence of diminished birth-rate, as in France, leads to 
the conclusion that an unusual decrease in that rate 
will occur before there is any considerable abasement 
in the conditions of the folk. 

In North America, the soils of the first order, those 
easily appropriated and affording large returns to til¬ 
lage, have already been generally occupied. Further 
subjugation will have to be gained either from forested 
areas of the second and third class, where the soil will 


14 Man and the Earth 

give relatively low returns to labor unless it is brought 
up to more than its natural fertility by a care which 
we are at present indisposed to give lean fields. Thus 
developed there are land reserves on this continent now 
in upland forests which may afford subsistence to 
twice or thrice the existing population. In this reck¬ 
oning no account is taken of the large unoccupied 
areas in northern Canada, which, it is claimed, are well 
suited for permanent tillage. There is as yet doubt 
whether this district, owing to the limited range of 
the crops which can be grown in the very short sum¬ 
mer, and the tax of the long-continued winters, will 
prove well fitted for the continuous uses of civilized 
man. Should they be found thus serviceable, we may 
add enough to the store of immediately available land 
to subsist from twenty to fifty million people. 

In South America, the unoccupied lands which can 
be brought to use without engineering work appear 
to be sufficiently extensive to maintain in the tropical 
and sub-tropical conditions of that continent a con¬ 
siderably greater population than can be supported 
by the soil of North America. It is not unlikely that 
these tropical available lands could be made to support 
four of five hundred million folk at a standard of 
living quite as high as that now attained in India or 
China. By far the greater part of this population 
will dwell within the tropics, a region evidently un¬ 
fitted for the development of what we esteem as the 
higher kind of man, but he will there have a fair share 
of the earth. 


Earth and Man 


*5 

In Africa the conditions are very like those of South 
America. There is a very large area of tropical land 
which is scantily occupied by peoples of the lower sort. 
These folk, however, differ from the aboriginal peoples 
of the American continents in that they are fitted by 
nature for agricultural labor and can readily be made 
to work in an efficient way. Under the control of the 
masterful European states Africa is likely to afford 
room for a population of not less than five hundred 
million, of whom the greater part will necessarily be 
of the negro and Arab stocks, and this without reckon¬ 
ing the lands which may be won by engineering work 
from the deserts or the morasses. 

In Australia and the islands of the Pacific realm, 
there is relatively little unused land which can be 
turned to account; in the humid tropical areas the 
population is generally well adjusted to the resources, 
and in the arid the opportunities for extended irriga¬ 
tion are not very great. It seems questionable whether 
room can be made in these lands for more than an 
additional fifty million folk. 

There remains to be considered the great continent 
of Asia. In this ample realm, we find the population 
of all its fields south of Siberia in general pressed up 
against the limits of the soil resources. There is some 
room for gain in the region of the Twin Rivers and 
the Kahnates, but it is doubtful if without very exten¬ 
sive engineering work place can be made for another 
hundred million folk in the valleys which drain to the 
Pacific and the Indian oceans. The Arctic slope of the 


16 Man and the Earth 

continent is the only field where there is an extensive 
unoccupied area which has conditions that promise 
to support a large additional population. The value of 
this district for the uses of civilized men cannot well 
be estimated with the information concerning it which 
is now in hand: it is subjected to the same, or even 
more, doubt than that of the country of northern Can¬ 
ada. The greater part of it lies, like much of the land 
in sub-arctic Canada, in the region of permanently 
frozen sub-soil, only the upper foot or two sharing in 
the brief summer, so that the soil cannot be watered 
from below. That much of it is fertile and will for a 
time produce crops of small grain, roots, and forage is 
evident; but it all is afflicted with a long and very 
rigorous winter when water for man and beast has 
to be obtained by melting ice or snow, and the con¬ 
sumption of the stored food is very great. Moreover, 
there seems to be an insufficient supply of coal to serve 
even for domestic purposes, and in many parts of the 
country the resources from the natural timber are in¬ 
sufficient to meet such needs. Except where peat 
occurs, it is likely that the people will have to resort 
to the practice of burning the dung of their domesti¬ 
cated animals, and we know from the experience of 
western Russia how fatally and swiftly the fields are 
exhausted by this practice. Those only who are very 
optimistic will be disposed to reckon on an increase 
in the population of Siberia that will add one hundred 
million to the total of the Asiatic continent. 

The foregoing glance at the conditions of the lands 


Earth and Man 


17 

which are now open to the increase in population 
which has to be expected within two or three centuries 
may be taken approximately to show that, at most, 
there is enough to admit of something like a doubling 
of the present numbers; and that without any consid- 
erable engineering work in lands not now available for 
tillage a total of somewhere about four thousand mil¬ 
lion can be supported in tolerable comfort. The ques¬ 
tion arises as to the additional food-giving capacity 
of the earth which may be won by means of engineer¬ 
ing and other scientific work, as in irrigating arid 
fields or draining those which are excessively watered, 
or by improving the methods of fertilizing soils now 
in use. 

It is impossible, with the present lack of information, 
to determine accurately how extensive is the field 
which may be won to tillage by the work of the engi¬ 
neers: this winning from the excessively arid lands 
will be done by irrigation, and from the morasses, the 
fresh-water swamps, and the marine marshes by drain¬ 
age. In Europe the larger part of the land thus win- 
nable has long been brought to use; it is not likely that 
an increase of ten per cent, in the food-giving capacity 
of its soils can, by any such means, be realized. In 
the less-developed continents the gain is likely to be 
much greater. Thus within the limits of the United 
States the writer has estimated that the fields improv¬ 
able by drainage, in the manner already applied in 
Holland, would add to the tillable ground of the 
country an area somewhat exceeding one hundred 


i8 


Man and the Earth 


thousand square miles in extent, with a food-giving 
value about four times that of the State of Illinois, 
wherein the soil would be far more enduring than that 
of any upland district. The complementary process, 
that of irrigation, promises to afford yet larger gains. 
Including the area of the South and the Middle West 
where the system would greatly increase the food-giv¬ 
ing value of the soil we may reckon the possible en¬ 
largement from it would be even greater than that 
afforded by a complete drainage of the morasses. 
Taking the continent of North America as a whole, 
it seems probable that the existing capacity of its 
soils for feeding men may be doubled by the work of 
the engineer, through his skill in watering and un¬ 
watering its deserts and morasses. 

On the other continents the opportunities for win¬ 
ning good land from arid deserts are probably less than 
in North America, yet the possible gain is such that 
we may reckon that when his great work is done, 
the engineer will have recovered land enough to 
feed the existing population of the earth. In Africa 
there is the magnificent problem of the Nile, a river 
which wastes to the sea in its annual floods water 
enough to fertilize tenfold the desert that it now 
makes fertile. There is the valley of the Twin Rivers 
of Asia, where a realm once fertile has become a 
waste by the loss of its irrigation works. There are 
in all the great lands vast areas of lakes, swamps, 
and marshes awaiting the skilful labor which has won 
Holland from the sea. The largest opportunity of 


Earth and Man 


*9 

profit is in such brave combats with the incomplete 
work of Nature. 

The problem of how we are to maintain the fertility 
of the soil when the earth is taxed by a population 
thrice as great as it now supports, depends upon our 
ability to restrain the excessive rapidity with which 
tilled soils pass to the sea, and our ability to restore 
to the land the materials which the cultivated plants 
remove. We shall find that both these needs are fairly 
to be met by the resources of modern science; the first 
by a proper control of the movements of water from 
where it falls upon the land to its station in the ocean, 
and the second by a resort to the ocean and the under¬ 
earth for the materials to renew the fertility of the 
ground when it is exhausted by cropping. There is 
much to do in order to make the earth fit to bear the 
life to come, but there is every reason to believe that 
our science is ready for the task and that within two 
centuries of peaceful endeavor we may prepare the 
place for it. Some of the steps of this preparation 
will be considered in the following chapters of this 
book. 


II 


THE FUTURE OF POWER 
L the progressive desires which characterize 



modern civilization call for an ever-increasing 


share of the energy to be applied to the arts; 
from an economic point of view it is this feature which 
most clearly separates the culture of our time from 
that of the ancients. The Greek of the best estate 
had only the strength of a few domesticated animals 
and of slaves to help him to his large share in the 
world’s goods. The pauper of our time is incidentally, 
but most effectively, helped by a retinue of mechanical 
servants, who give him the profit of perhaps a hundred 
fold as much energy as ever contributed to the wel¬ 
fare of an Athenian gentleman. This change has 
come about in very modern times, and is now in the 
prowess of its development; it is evidently to increase 
to the point when all the sources of power will be util¬ 
ized to somewhere near their possible capacity, and the 
individual or the state of the century to come will have 
success in proportion to the dynamic energy that may 
be controlled. Therefore the first question in our 
effort to forecast the conditions of men concerns the 
possibilities of increasing the supply of power appli¬ 
cable to the arts. 


The Future of Power 21 

A glance at the facts shows us that all the dynamic 
energy at the command of men comes more or less 
directly from the sun. To the idealist’s advice, 
“ Hitch your wagon to a star,” the practical man 
might well retort that all our wagons are necessarily 
tackled to the particular star that does the work of 
this sphere. All that work, from the trifling share 
of brain and pen that writes these words to that which 
sways the winds and sends the waters in their streams, 
is celestial energy, practically all derived from the sun, 
energy which is held upon the earth by the air and 
set upon the diverse work we behold. We see this the 
more clearly upon the contrasted state of the moon, 
where for geologic ages there has been no work done 
because there is no air to entrap the heat and turn it 
to the varied tasks which it performs upon the earth. 

The energy that is at work upon the surface of the 
earth, except the trifle from its depths derived mostly 
from volcanic outbreaks, comes immediately from the 
sun. The greater part of it is speedily sent forth again 
into the spaces. Only a little is for a time detained in 
the water that it has lifted into the air, or upon the 
lands, or mayhap for years in the bodies of animals 
and plants, or, exceptionally, for geologic ages, in the 
incompletely decayed remains of organic life which are 
buried in strata. The sources of energy available for 
mechanical power have to be from one or another of 
these stores derived from the sun. The most imme¬ 
diate of them, that which is the nearest to the source of 
power, is the wind; next in order the water, which 


22 


Man and the Earth 

has been lifted by solar heat to high levels on the land, 
and is on its gravitational journey back to the seas; 
then the waves of the sea, a possible, but in an econo¬ 
mic sense improbable, source of power. Then again 
there is the timber of our forests, and, the last in this 
series, the buried organic remains, which give us access 
to ancient solar energy in the form of coal, mineral oils, 
and gases. Outside of this field of power derived from 
the sun, there is another source of some importance 
to be found in the tides, due mainly to the gravitative 
attraction of the moon, which promises in time to be 
locally serviceable to man. We shall now glance at 
these several resources with a view to estimating their 
prospective utility. 

The largest share of solar energy which we have 
a chance to capture and turn to account in our 
arts is that embodied in the winds. There are as yet 
insufficient data for computing the quantity of this 
power that can possibly be won for our service, but 
it certainly amounts to very many times as much as is 
now won from all the other sources now utilized by 
man. This source of power was the first to be used — 
at the outset in the sails of boats — but it has as yet 
afforded little help in the arts. The winds have ground 
much corn and pumped a deal of water, but, except 
in sails, they have not helped us much. The diffi¬ 
culty arises from the great variations in the speed of the 
air currents and the long periods in which the move¬ 
ment is so slight that they afford no effective power 
whatever, together with other periods when their speed 


The Future of Power 23 

is likely to be destructive to any machinery large 
enough to win much value in any state of their mo¬ 
tion. It seems likely, however, that the method of 
the storage battery, with the cheapening of its cost 
and the increase of its efficiency, which may reasonably 
be expected in the near future, will enable us so to 
husband the energy afforded by windmills that they 
will serve for constant uses. It may also be possible 
to find a more direct way of utilizing this source of 
power by using the variable work of windmills in 
pumping water to a height whence it can be made to 
give a constant supply to water engines. As it is, this 
oldest servant of man is still among his useful helpers; 
the sails of mills and ships are together more numerous 
than any other machines by which he hitches his econo¬ 
mic wagons to the stars, and in time they are likely to 
yield more power than all other devices. 

The next largest source of solar energy is that ob¬ 
tained from falling water. Until less than a generation 
ago water-power had a very limited application, for 
the reason that it had to be utilized at or very near 
the point where it was obtained — and it could be 
carried by wire-rope belts for a distance of not more 
than a few hundred feet. With the method of turn¬ 
ing the energy of falling water into electricity and 
thence back to dynamic power it is now possible to 
send that force a hundred miles from the point 
where it is obtained and with the improvements 
that are constantly making, it seems likely that the 
distance to which it may be conveyed will in time be- 


24 Man and the Earth 

come practically unlimited. In no other case has the 
use of' any source of power been so speedily extended. 
A glance at the rapidly developing situation will show 
us that this source of energy promises to effect very 
great changes in the seats of industries and conse¬ 
quently of population. 

It is evident that the amount of water-power avail¬ 
able in a country depends on three factors: the amount 
of rain, or melting snow; the average height above 
the sea of the field on which it falls; /ind the extent 
to which the flow of water is or can be evenly distrib¬ 
uted throughout the year. This is a complex equa¬ 
tion, one' not easily solved, yet in a rough way it 
enables us to determine much as to the future of ac¬ 
cessible power and thereby forecast the success of com¬ 
munities, so far as that success depends thereon. Thus 
in Europe we see that certain streams radiating from 
the Alps, such as the tributaries of the Rhone, the Po, 
and the Rhine, which are fed to a great extent by. 
melting snows and have great natural reservoirs in the 
lakes through which they flow, are well placed in rela¬ 
tion to this source of energy. So, too, with the streams 
of Sweden and Norway, which come down rapidly 
from a great height and are likewise, for various rea¬ 
sons, of fairly uniform discharge. Thus when coal 
becomes impossibly dear because of the approaching 
exhaustion of the limited store, as will surely be the 
case within three centuries, these favored regions will 
be the seats of manufacturing, which will pass from 
its present stations where it depends on fuel. 


The Future of Power 25 

On the whole North America is, as regards its possi¬ 
ble water-powers, more favorably placed than any other 
continent. The amount of falling water is less than in 
South America, perhaps less than in Africa, but the 
distribution is better for the needs of man. In all the 
glaciated district which occupies near one-half of its 
surface, natural storage is provided by the porous 
water-holding nature of the drift deposits and by the 
lakes that by the tens of thousands occupy these 
glaciated fields. This glaciated district of North 
America is, indeed, the richest part of the world in 
streams fitted to drive wheels. We seek in vaijn else¬ 
where for any region of this kind comparable to the 
area on the eastern side of the continent between the 
Arctic circle and the Ohio and westward to the centre 
of the great continental valley, from the upper Miss¬ 
issippi and the Ohio to the Mackenzie River. The 
southern Appalachians also afford a field abound¬ 
ing in streams fitted to be sources of power, deficient 
only in storage, which is partly supplied by the forests 
and by the deep coating of decayed rock which, in a 
measure, acts, as does the drift, in the manner of a 
sponge to detain the water on its way to the sea. In 
the plain region of the Middle West, we have a broad 
field where the streams, because of their slight fall, can 
afford little help to man’s arts. But again in the east¬ 
ern face of the Cordilleras, from the Arkansas River 
northward to the Arctic circle, the rivers, though of 
scanty flow, promise great value in the way of power; 
and fed as they are by melting snows, their discharge, 


i6 


Man and the Earth 

at least in their lower reaches, is fairly steadfast. In 
the central region of the Cordilleras there is as far 
north as the Canada line a wide belt of country where 
the rainfall is very small in amount. We find little 
power value in the streams, but on the western slope 
facing the Pacific Ocean, and increasingly from Cali¬ 
fornia northward to Alaska, there is, for its width, a 
noble body of power awaiting the call to use. It is this 
store combined with the mineral resources of the Cor- 
dilleran field, together with the quality of its people, 
that is to give the States of this region their domi¬ 
nance in the Pacific realm. 

As to the water-power of the other continents, it may 
be said in general that while it is certain to be a vast 
advantage to many wide fields, it is rather narrowly 
limited in value by the lack of possibilities of storage, 
combined with a bad seasonal distribution. Of the 
regions which promise much, we may note the eastern 
face of the Andes for the greater part of its length, 
the high country of eastern Brazil, and, with some 
limitations, all the country from the La Plata north¬ 
ward; in Africa, certainly the valley of the upper 
Nile, that of the Zambesi, and, on a basis of imperfect 
knowledge, the great valleys of the Congo and of the 
Niger; as a whole this continent probably ranks next 
after North America in its water-power sources. In 
Australia the prevailing aridity of the region makes 
the value of this resource relatively small, yet in ratio 
to the food-yielding resources of the land it is consider¬ 
able. The greater islands of the Malayan archipelago 


The Future of Power 27 

are, because of their prevailing high rainfall, fairly 
well placed for power. So, too, are the isles of the 
eastern coast of Asia; the Philippines are, for nar¬ 
row lands, fairly rich in opportunities for water mills; 
in Asia there is the promise to the future of its peoples 
of a vast profit from this source of help. 

On the mainland of Asia the most important dis¬ 
trict for water-power is to be found in the southern 
versant of the Himalayas, where streams of fair vol¬ 
ume and permanence descend from a great average 
height to the lower open country. This condition con¬ 
tinues around the eastern side of the central Asiatic 
mountain systems, affording in the interior of China 
similar opportunities to those of India. On the Arctic 
slope of the continent the rivers, though of less flow 
than those discharging to the South and East, will 
afford a large amount of power. Below the head¬ 
waters in the Arctic slope of Siberia the rivers descend 
gently, and though of large volume, they are not likely 
to be of great value to the arts. As a whole, the share 
of available water-power in Asia, in proportion to its 
area or the food-giving capacity of its soils, is prob¬ 
ably less than in any other of the continents except 
Australia. Yet even in Australia there is the promise 
of a vast profit from this source of help. 

Considered as a whole, the rivers of the earth 
promise, with the aid of the engineer, to afford far 
more dynamic help to the arts than all that now serves 
them. Moreover, this help will be from sources of con¬ 
tinuous supply and not like that from coal, in the way 


28 


Man and the Earth 

of speedy exhaustion. And further, the full utilization 
of the streams, as sources of power, because it involves 
the process of holding back the flood-waters, will in a 
considerable measure aid in diminishing the speed with 
which the soil passes to the sea, while the water, after 
it has been used to turn the wheels, may, to a great 
extent, be made to serve the purposes of irrigation. 
The increase in the use of this source of energy will 
probably not continue to be very rapid until the supply 
of the fossil fuel aproaches exhaustion; from that time 
on it will necessarily be speedy, until all this group of 
resources is completely applied to the arts. 

The other source of power originating beyond the 
earth is the tide produced mainly by the moon’s attrac¬ 
tion. This movement of the sea probably not exceeding 
in the central parts of the oceans a rise and fall of more 
than a foot or so, is in many places accumulated on 
the shores to a great height. There are many thousand 
miles of coast line where the average swing of the 
waters amounts to ten feet or more, and along hun¬ 
dreds of miles of shore it exceeds twice that amount. 
The total energy involved in the tidal movement is so 
large that if all of it could be turned to the uses of man 
there would be a supply ample for the needs of 
all the hosts which the soil could sustain with the best 
husbanding. Unfortunately, we can conceive of no 
convenient means whereby this power which the sun 
and moon expend upon the earth can in any great 
measure be applied to industries. The tide-mill, 
which appears to have been designed in England some 


The Future of Power 29 

centuries ago and to have been brought to this country 
in the colonial period, is a simple device consisting of 
a dam with wheels so arranged that they are impelled 
by the water as it enters or leaves the embayed space. 
The energy thus attained may be very considerable; 
it would not be costly at many places to win a maxi¬ 
mum of several thousand horse-power. There is, 
however, the serious difficulty that the energy thus 
obtained is irregularly distributed, the maximum aris¬ 
ing twice each day at mid-tide and falling to nothing 
four times each day at the time of low and high 
tide. There are yet other irregularities in the dif¬ 
ference between spring and neap tides, as well as the 
daily alteration by about an hour of the maxima and 
minima of the risings. The result is that there have 
never been more than a few hundred tide-mills at any 
one time in operation, and these have been limited to 
such uses as grinding corn. With the development 
of steam-power, they have gradually passed out of 
service, so that it is doubtful if there be a score of them 
now in operation in North America. It is, however, 
possible that with the development of an efficient 
storage-battery system the powers obtainable from the 
tides will be greatly increased. In the time, but a few 
centuries remote from the present, when the need of 
replacing the power derived from fuel is great, the 
tide is pretty sure to afford a most valuable resource 
to all the countries about the northern parts of the 
Atlantic and Pacific oceans where the range is great 
and the sites for mills numerous. 


30 


Man and the Earth 

It has often been suggested that power could be 
obtained from the motion of the sea waves. There 
is no question but that the energy involved in the 
surges is great, for in an ordinary storm the pressure 
of their stroke on the cliffs may amount to as much 
as ten thousand pounds to the square foot, or about 
that in an ordinary low-pressure boiler; but the ex¬ 
ceedingly intermittent and variable nature of this 
action, together with the difficulties of maintaining any 
machinery which can render it serviceable for the arts, 
makes it unlikely that it will be utilized save in the 
last extremity of need. 

There is yet another way by which we may find 
access to solar energy, one which is even more direct 
than any of those already described: we may reflect 
those rays by mirrors or refract them by lenses 
and thereby concentrate their heat. There is an ancient 
story — surely no more than myth — that Archi¬ 
medes contrived to do this so effectively in the siege 
of Syracuse that he set fire to ships. In an extremity 
for lack of power there is no doubt that we could with 
some profit resort to this system. In those parts of 
the earth, in low latitudes, where the sky is rarely 
clouded, about a hundred square feet of mirrors would 
for some hours each day afford energy equal to a 
horse-power, but, as was just said, it would be a state 
of extreme and unforeseeable need that would bring 
this method into any considerable use. 

This is true also of a project, once much discussed, 
of utilizing the central heat of the earth. It exists in 


The Future of Power 31 

such ample stores that if we could draw upon it, there 
would be power for all the conceivable needs of man 
for a million of years to come. But there is no con¬ 
ceivable way in which it could be brought to general 
use. Where there are hot springs of large volume it 
would be possible to turn them to service, but such op¬ 
portunities are so exceptional as to be of no impor¬ 
tance. It has also been suggested that it might be pos¬ 
sible to bore down into the earth to a sufficient depth 
to heat water much above the boiling point; but, save 
near volcanic centres and certain other very exceptional 
places, this scheme is quite impracticable. The aver¬ 
age increase in temperature is only about 100 deg. 
Fahr. for the mile of descent, and at less than three 
miles down the pressure would speedily close the pipe. 
Thus we see that the earth’s vast inner store of energy 
cannot be of avail. 

We come now to the energy derived from the sun, 
which can be won to use by burning the carbon which 
is locked up in organic matter; in the timber of the 
forests; in recent peats, or their equivalents; in beds 
of coal, and in those curious carbonaceous products of 
animal remains, petroleum, and burnable rock gases. 
As for the wood of the forests, it is everywhere an 
ephemeral source of supply. When the earth is as 
fully peopled as it is likely to be in the twenty-third 
century of our era, there will be no forests save those 
that may be preserved in order to insure the flow of 
streams. At best, and with the utmost economy, it 
requires about an acre of woodland to meet the needs 


32 Man and the Earth 

of each civilized person in high latitudes — as much as 
is required for his food. With the crowding which 
now exists in most developed countries, this resource 
can have no value as a source of power. 

The most recently formed of the fossil fuels, the peat 
deposits, which, in practically all cases, have been 
formed since the last glacial period, are of much more 
value as a source of power than is commonly reckoned. 
They occur in all the humid regions beyond the tropics; 
and, in general, are best developed in the glaciated dis¬ 
tricts. Data to determine their extent are lacking, but 
from certain observations in New England, it seems 
likely that the available widely scattered deposits of that 
district may be reckoned as having a total area of at 
least five hundred square miles, with an average depth 
of ten feet, the deposit having about the heat-giving 
value of ordinary coal contained in a bed of that area 
and rather less than half that thickness. Northward, 
on this continent, to the Arctic circle, the beds of this 
material are found in even larger proportion to the area. 
Probably the one-hundredth of the surface of die con¬ 
tinent 'is similarly conditioned. The aggregate of this 
store is vast, amounting in volume to perhaps as much 
as all the coal beds, and in heat-giving value to perhaps 
one-half of those deposits. There are certain serious 
difficulties connected with the utilization of peat which 
have greatly limited its value in the arts and for a cen¬ 
tury or more have diminished its use as a fuel. When 
it is taken from the bogs it holds about half its weight 
of water, which is only slowly and partly dried away, 


The Future of Power 33 

and when the material is dried it is very bulky in pro¬ 
portion to its heat-giving power. A host of processes' 
have been invented for drying and compressing the 
crude peat, but experience has shown that in the 
United States this cannot profitably be undertaken at 
the present price of coal. There is, however, the pos¬ 
sibility that in many places the substance can be used 
without other treatment than drying for the manufac¬ 
ture of fuel gas, and this gas can then be burned for 
making electrical power. In such a way this store of 
ancient solar energy may become immediately avail¬ 
able in the arts. In any event it remains a reserve on 
which the people of the future may draw in the ever- 
advancing need of power. 

We turn now to the deeply buried deposits of carbon, 
coal, petroleum, and rock gas which have been the basis 
of the economic side of our modern civilization. It is 
well to begin this part of our inquiry by noting that 
the formation of these stores of fuel depends on the 
action of organic creatures in taking carbon from the 
carbonic acid gas of the atmosphere and storing it in 
the earth. This task is effected by the plants, which 
each day take some million tons of carbon from the 
air to shape it in their forms. The greater part of this 
element goes back to the atmosphere on the death of 
the creatures it has served; some part of it is taken 
into the bodies of animals who are not able to obtain 
carbon directly from the inorganic realm. This, too, 
normally passes straightway back to the air by the pro¬ 
cesses of decay. In some part, however, the remains 
3 


34 Man and the Earth 

of plants and animals are deposited under water in 
such conditions that the carbon they hold is not quickly 
combined with oxygen and thus delivered into the air, 
but stays until it forms a bed of humus or peat and is 
buried in the sea bottom or in the beds of lakes beneath 
deposits of clay, sand, or limestone; then, if it be the 
remains of plants, it may change to coal, and if it be 
animal waste, to petroleum or rock gas. 

The passage from the state of peat to that of coal is 
gradual: with the escape of a certain part of the more 
volatile compounds of carbon in the form of gases and 
with the increasing pressure of the overlying rocks 
and the added heat, we have at first lignites; then 
brown coal; then in time bituminous; later, anthracite 
coal, and finally, at the extreme point of the series, 
graphite — an essentially unburnable form of carbon. 
In these changes of vegetable matter there is no consid¬ 
erable production of oil, and the gases which are 
formed do not seem to be preserved in the rocks. In 
the decomposition of the animal remains buried in 
strata there is no coaly substance produced, but if the 
conditions be favorable the free carbon of their bodies 
is combined with hydrogen, forming hydrocarbons in 
the form of the varied petroleum group and the com¬ 
monest and most useful natural gas. This burial of 
carbon in the form of plant and animal remains in the 
burnable form suited to make coal, oil, or gas is ex¬ 
ceptional ; by far the greater part that enters the earth 
finds its way there in union with lime, magnesia, or 
other elements under conditions which do not admit of 


The Future of Power 35 

its being used as fuel. Probably of each ton of in¬ 
humed carbon so much as the hundredth part becomes 
a possible source of heat for the uses of man. 

The amount of fossil fuel is not only small but 
evanescent. The beds of coal are always formed on 
the land; they have rarely been buried to the depth 
of more than a few thousand feet and are generally 
in process of rapid destruction by erosion. Oil and 
gas, being from the remains of marine animals, are 
usually found in rocks that obtain deeper burial and 
that occur more widely, but these substances are easily 
driven out by heat, and when the beds containing them 
are even moderately heated they are sent forth to the 
air. Moreover, the pressure of the gases on the rocks 
is constantly so great that they are always eager to 
escape from their prison, and are likely to expel the 
oil with which they are mingled. Thus it comes about 
that the fields of oil and gas are much more narrowly 
limited than those containing coal. 

As a whole the combustible carbon in the forms of 
peat, coal, oil, and gas constitute the least important 
of the several great sources of energy which are at the 
command of man. They are not only exhaustible, but 
form a store that cannot be expected to endure the 
drain made on it for more than three or four cen¬ 
turies. We now know that the coal beds of any great 
value are essentially limited to the regions beyond the 
tropics, and practically to the regions north of 30 deg. 
north latitude. The reason for this is that the equa¬ 
torial districts have always been the seat of such 


3 6 Man and the Earth 

high temperature that peat, the first stage of coal, 
could not accumulate there to any considerable extent, 
and so the coal-making process did not have a chance to 
begin. The store is effectively limited to the northern 
parts of North America and of the Eurasian continent. 
Of this accumulation the share of Europe will be sub¬ 
stantially exhausted by the end of the present century: 
indeed, if the present increase in the demands upon it 
continues, this exhaustion may come within sixty or 
seventy years. This does not mean that all or nearly 
all of the coal that lies beneath the surface will have 
been used, but that much of the store is now so deeply 
buried by the down-folding of strata that it is not 
in existing economic conditions available. That which 
remains will serve only when the needs are desperate 
and are far beyond what can be met by the other 
sources of power and heat. 

In northern Asia, especially in China, there are very 
extensive deposits of coal. The Chinese empire prob¬ 
ably has a store larger than any other except that of 
the United States, a resource which, in combination 
with the cheap labor of that country, is certain to play 
a large part in the economic development of the lands 
about the northern Pacific realm. So far as the world 
is to depend on coal as a source of power, there are but 
two districts that will have a chance to attain a large 
and enduring success; these are the fields of western 
China and that of North America east of the Mississ¬ 
ippi and south of the St. Lawrence, and these areas, 
vast as is the store of fuel they contain, are not likely 


The Future of Power 37 

to meet the demands made upon them in the next 
three hundred years. With rare and local exceptions 
their beds of coal are much more easily accessible be¬ 
cause they require less deep mining than those of Eu¬ 
rope or Asia, so that they will probably be exhausted 
long before those of England and Belgium come to 
an end. 

The other burnable materials of the under-earth, 
rock, gas, and petroleum, will certainly not endure the 
demands made on them for nearly as long as will the 
coal deposits. The rock gases are a peculiarly evanes¬ 
cent store. Experience has shown that the fields 
which have been developed are not likely to afford 
a profitable supply for more than two or three decades. 
These fields are of seldom occurrence, none of consid¬ 
erable value having been found in Europe. The con¬ 
ditions of their formation indicate that they may not be 
expected to exist in the other continents to the extent 
that we find them in the central valley of North Amer¬ 
ica. They are formed in vast quantities from the de¬ 
composition of organic matter, and in every coal bed 
in the transition period from peat to the bituminous a 
considerable part of the carbon combines with hydro¬ 
gen to produce them; but for some reason that is not 
yet clear this gas is never in any considerable quantity 
retained in the coal-bearing strata. Now and then it 
is found in quantities great enough to originate those 
well-known unhappy explosions of mines which so 
frequently occur, but in these accidents the burning 
gas is small in quantity and of itself not the cause of 


38 Man and the Earth 

the damage which is brought about by the fired coal 
dust that is shaken into the air. Now and then we 
may note the gas escaping from the newly broken face 
of the coal, showing that it is held, under pressure, 
in the mass; but, as above suggested, it passes from the 
strata to the upper air about as rapidly as it is formed. 
But when the rock gas is developed from animal re¬ 
mains near a bed of porous rock with a covering of 
dense material, the gas then finds lodgment in the 
interspaces and may gather a pressure of a thousand 
pounds or so to the square inch. When the beds con¬ 
taining the gas are penetrated by the drill, the dis¬ 
charge takes place so rapidly that a few years suffice 
to drain a large area. This source of energy is certain 
to be less enduring than any of the others to which 
man can turn. 

The petroleums, when first brought into use, were 
supposed to afford a basis for industries as extensive 
and as lasting as the coal deposits. Time has shown 
that while these accumulations are in some places, as 
at Baku, in vast quantities, none of the so-called basins 
which are now drawn upon are likely to withstand the 
drain for a half-century to come. Inasmuch as the 
rock oils are formed from decomposing animal matter, 
there is reason to believe that they have been very gen¬ 
erally produced in all marine deposits abounding in 
fossils; that is, in nearly all beds formed on the floors 
of the ancient seas at some distance from the shores. 
It is tolerably certain that if we had access to all this 
oil, it would in amount many times exceed in energy- 


The Future of Power 39 

giving value all the other existing stores of fuel. Un¬ 
fortunately, the rock gases are abundantly formed 
along with the oil; and by their accumulated pressure 
force the fluid to the surface, where it is broken up and 
dispersed. Consequently while there is probably a large 
amount of petroleum beneath the sea floors quite in¬ 
accessible to man; the amount at his disposal beneath 
the lands is small. In western Europe there is, in an 
economic sense, no petroleum. In North America, the 
fields probably now fairly well known are limited to the 
Mississippi valley and possibly the country to the north¬ 
ward as far as the Arctic circle, southern Texas, New 
Brunswick, and to a belt on the coast of California. 
The Baku, or Caspian district of Russia, is the only 
part of the old world where large amounts of oil are 
well known to exist, but it is likely that other fields 
will be disclosed in Siberia and in China. Like dis¬ 
coveries are to be reckoned on in Africa, Australia, and 
South America, but it is not at all likely that any of 
them will exceed North America in their yield, and it 
is evident that the oil of this continent will probably 
not outlast the present century. 

It is to be noted that while the native petroleum of 
the world can be no more than a temporary source of 
energy in the forms of heat and light, oil of like 
quality can be produced in vastly larger amounts from 
certain carbonaceous shales which plentifully occur in 
various parts of the world. One of these formations, 
perhaps the most extensive, is that of the Ohio valley 
and adjacent districts in the east and north. Here we 


4 o 


Man and the Earth 


have a set of beds averaging more than a hundred feet 
in thickness which, over wide areas, will yield to dis¬ 
tillation probably about one-tenth of its mass in oil, 
paraffin, and related substances; it affords the range 
of chemical properties which make our rock oils the 
source of so many substances necessary in the arts. 
From this deposit, but one of the many that are found 
in various parts of the world, we may look for a store 
of energy which may be drawn upon long after the 
beds of coal have been consumed. This oil and other 
burnable materials will be won at a much greater cost 
than where they are obtained from wells, in the fluid 
state; but the by-products of the distillation to which 
the rock is subjected will probably be as valuable as 
those afforded by the natural oil. The present writer 
has computed that the oil which may possibly be had 
from the Ohio shale above mentioned will in volume 
much exceed the amount of water contained in Lake 
Superior. This estimate cannot pretend to accuracy, 
but it may serve to indicate the amplitude of this source 
of material serving for a wide range of needs. 

While the beds which may be distilled in order to 
obtain petroleum and its related products are very 
extensive and widely distributed, we cannot, with cer¬ 
tainty, look to them as sources of power in most parts 
of the world, until the coal beds are effectively ex¬ 
hausted. As a source of illuminating oils they are 
likely to be resorted to extensively in the immediate 
future and to serve this use for centuries. It may be 
that the gas engine, that group of contrivances which 


The Future of Power 41 

seems likely to displace the engine of Watt, will be so 
developed that petroleum distilled from bituminous 
shales will be an economical source of power. 

Viewed as a whole, the forecast for the future of 
power with the world peopled to its maximum of food¬ 
giving resources, is favorable. While coal and natural 
oils and gases are essentially temporary resources, not 
to be considered available for more than three or four 
centuries to come, they constitute but a small part of 
the offerings of nature on this sphere. The falling 
waters, the winds, and the tides are great and perma¬ 
nent sources of supply from which the crafty mind of 
man will be certain to win his needs for all his time. 
These sources of supply he will supplement with the 
oils obtained from the above-mentioned carbonaceous 
shales, and from the same source he will seek for dye¬ 
stuffs, medicaments, and the host of petroleum products 
which are now regarded as mere by-products. For all 
we dare reckon of the future the great stores of solar 
energy are sure to be at the service of our kind, as 
many as the earth can feed; and this in far larger 
share to each individual than we now demand. 


Ill 

THE EXHAUSTION OF THE METALS 


I T is evident that the economic side of human ad¬ 
vance, as well as the greater part of the contriv¬ 
ing foresight which characterizes it, depends 
upon the qualities of materials men turn to account. 
The story of adaptation of substances to desires did 
not begin with man. It is common among the bees 
and ants and divers other insects. We see it in the 
nests of birds, in the hotbed in which the brush turkey 
lays her eggs. These contrivings generally relate to 
utility alone, yet often the sense of beauty guides the 
construction so that the aesthetic as well as the utilita¬ 
rian motives appear to exist in the minds of many 
highly developed animals, and readily lead to the adap¬ 
tation of outward things to the needs of the body and 
the mind. 

It is interesting to note that the utilitarian motive is 
much less developed in the mammalian ancestry of man 
than in the insects or the birds. A distinct sign of it 
can be found only in the group of rodents, as in the 
beavers, but this order lies far aside from the series of 
animals from which our kind came up. It appears 
pretty certain that except possibly for the occasional 
use of a stick or stone as a rude tool wherewith to 


43 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 

break a nut, or a huddle of branches placed in the fork 
of a tree to serve as a nest, none of our prehuman 
ancestors met their advancing needs by the use of the 
materials that might have served them. As soon, how¬ 
ever, as the critical point between the brute and man 
was passed by, the new creature entered upon a realm 
in which the qualities of things were to satisfy its 
progressive desires and in the process enlarge its 
intelligence. 

At first sight, there does not seem to be much differ¬ 
ence between the way the monkey and the lowlier man 
use the stick or stone to serve their immediate needs; 
but while the ape gives no evidence of judgment in 
any act, in the lowliest man judgment and construc¬ 
tive endeavor always appear to enter. The roughest 
stone tools used by the most primitive toiler are 
chosen with reference to shape and endurance. They 
are shaped with rude but advancing art, so that they 
may better serve their need, and speedily the aesthetic 
motive leads the man to endow them with beauty. 
Each of these early and simple conquests of nature 
leads to a sense of the powers of the outer world, 
so that even the lowliest savage becomes an inquirer 
in a true sense, a man of science exploring the world 
with his imagination of things possible, and verifying 
his conjectures by experiment. 

This is not the place to set forth what little we 
know by the study of primitive tribes and our own 
children concerning the steps by which man won his 
way to the earlier conquests of the material world; 


44 


Man and the Earth 


how at every step in the earlier inquiry he was, by his 
exuberant fancy, continuously and irresistibly led away 
from the path of science into the wilderness of super¬ 
stition, and how in the Greeks and their successors the 
better way was continued and affirmed. For our pur¬ 
pose we need see only that the truly experimental 
science of the savage and his barbarian successor led 
him afield, and that with the emancipation from super¬ 
stition the possible extension of his excursions has be¬ 
come, so far as we can see, almost limitless. What 
concerns us now is the extent to which our civilizations 
have become dependent or; the resources of the earth 
for their support or advancement, and how long the 
sphere is likely to endure the tax upon its store which 
the increasing numbers of mankind and their ever¬ 
growing demands are certain to make. 

Putting aside, for the moment, the vast range in 
minor substances, such as precious stones as well as the 
other minerals which do not support any important part 
of the functions of civilization, we find that the condi¬ 
tions essential to the maintenance and advance of 
civilized man are those relating to two fields of utility, 
one being the development and application of energy, 
the other the construction of vessels for the purpose of 
retaining and transporting substances. The last- 
named of these groups was the first to find a large 
place in the arts; long before men had managed to 
gain any access to natural forces they had learned to 
use the gourds, baskets, skin bags, vessels of pottery 
or hollowed wood for a great range of needs. The 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 45 

existence of the household and growth of economic 
foresight depend upon the invention of such retaining 
vessels. This application of materials must always 
remain the most fundamentally important. 

This history of retaining vessels shows that a suc¬ 
cessful and highly developed social economy is possible 
when they are made of baked clay, and, incidentally, 
of cloth. The best days of Greece and Rome did not 
know the can or barrel. In the time to come when, 
with the earth taxed to its utmost to support the popu¬ 
lation which may be expected with the abolition of 
pestilences and war, it will oe possible, though not con¬ 
venient, to dispense with the use of wood and metal 
for domestic and transportation uses, and to return to 
the classic earthenware. There is plenty of material 
to meet all possible demands for this purpose; clay 
suitable for such uses is found practically everywhere, 
and the amount of fuel necessary to bake it is relatively 
small. We may, therefore, regard the evils arising 
from the exhaustion of metals for this purpose as en¬ 
tirely evitable. As we shall see below, this limitation 
on the demand may, in a few centuries, be a matter of 
considerable consequence. 

Of the supply of metallic substances needed for the 
generation and application of power, we find that in 
the present state of our arts there are two of cardinal 
importance, viz.: iron and copper, half a dozen of 
secondary yet great utility, lead, zinc, tin, mercury, 
gold, and silver, and a number of others, such as nickel, 
which though most useful in the arts, do not materially 


Man and the Earth 


46 

affect the course^of civilization. If any of these metals, 
except iron and copper, were by some accident to be 
transmuted to-morrow, it would be temporarily most 
inconvenient, but the world would in a generation or 
two adjust itself to the loss without serious hindrance 
to its activities. If gold were to disappear, we should 
for a time have grave trouble in our traffic, but its 
use is essentially a matter of custom and we should 
have to undergo only a change in that regard. In the 
disappearance of the secondary metals, mercury would 
probably be the most serious loss, for it would be hard 
to replace it in our thermometers. Next to mercury, 
lead would be the most difficult to dispense wdth, for 
the reason that its qualities of weight and softness 
fit it as no other substance for use in small-arm pro¬ 
jectiles. But as war will surely disappear, and hunting 
also, in the bettered earth of the future, we could con¬ 
template these losses of quality with no great regret. 

Seeing, as we do, that the mainstays of our existing 
civilization among the metals are iron and copper, 
let us note in what ways they are necessary and what 
are the conditions of demand and supply that may be 
anticipated. First, as regards iron, it may be said that 
almost from the beginning of its use it has been 
adopted as the prime metal of civilization. It is not 
unlikely that men gained their first notions concerning 
the properties of this metal through experiments with 
the masses of it that had fallen from the sky. These 
are so far pure that if heated and beaten they would 
disclose properties which would lead an intelligent bar- 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 47 

barian to researches. He would easily see the evident 
likeness of these meteorites to many forms of iron 
ore, and with his skill already acquired in smelting the 
ores of copper, zinc, and tin, and in the simple furnaces 
that served him in such work he would readily find his 
way to producing the substance which, more than any 
other, has afforded his successor the means of dealing 
with nature. 

More than any other metal, iron, and its slightly 
modified form known as steel, affords the combination 
of qualities needed in the application of power. It is 
at once hard, rigid, flexible, and tough, and has these 
features through a considerable range of variations 
which may be readily induced; in the form of pig-iron 
it is meltable at a temperature easily attained even in 
primitive furnaces, and can then be cast in moulds; 
in another variety it can when heated be shaped as 
desired to an engine-shaft, a sword, or a watch-spring. 
Not the least of its values consists in its cheapness; 
even with the primitive smelting apparatus, the cost of 
a pound of iron, because of the plentiful distribution 
of the ores and the ease with which they were mined, 
was probably not more than a fifth of the cost of a 
pound of the earlier used bronze. At the present time, 
the average costs are in the ratio of about twenty to 
one. As regards the relative utility of the two mate¬ 
rials, the difference is in a far greater measure in favor 
of iron. A civilization in the age of Athens at its 
prime, or of India in the time of Christ, is possible with 
no more effective instruments than bronze affords. But 


48 Man and the Earth 

it is doubtful if the Roman culture and conquests could 
have been shaped without the use of iron, and it is 
certain that our modern states, so far as they depend 
on their command of energy, could not have developed, 
and perhaps cannot be maintained, without the use of 
iron or some other metal that is thus fitted to serve 
in acquiring and applying power. 

If we had now to reorganize our culture on the 
basis of iron at the ancient or even the lower modern 
cost of bronze, we should have to abandon much that 
might be termed necessary to our economic life; the 
most of our railways and steamships would be too 
costly for the services they render, great and seem¬ 
ingly indispensable as these are. A like reduction 
would have to be made in all our instruments by which 
we attack the resources of the earth, those of soil as 
well as mine. It is easy to imagine the shearing of our 
comforts and luxuries, and even of necessities, which 
such a change would involve. It is evident that the 
means of culture, which the well-conditioned laborer 
now has in larger measure than the prince of a thou¬ 
sand years ago, would be vastly reduced by such a 
change. Let us see whether such a need of readjust¬ 
ment is to be reckoned on in the centuries to come. 

Iron, as is well known, is a very widely diffused ele¬ 
ment. In combination with oxygen and other sub¬ 
stances it is found in most rocks. Because of the 
high specific gravity of the earth it is often stated 
that this metal must superabound in the deeper parts 
of the sphere; but there is no good reason for this 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 49 

notion, for the volcanic materials which presumably 
come from at least fifty miles below the surface, 
though they contain iron, do not indicate that the 
interior is peculiarly ferriferous. It is, moreover, not 
improbable that the infalling of meteors composed in 
large part of this metal has in the course of geologic 
ages considerably increased the store of it in the outer 
part of the sphere. 

Because the oxides of iron are rather soluble in 
water containing CO 2 , carbonic acid gas of common 
phrase, and because all the water moving or in the crust 
contains enough of this gas to give it solving capacity, 
iron oxides undergo a continuous process of dissolv¬ 
ing and are thereby diminished in the soil or porous 
rocks and concentrated in the lower strata. In this way 
they are gathered in deposits below the decaying vege¬ 
tation of swamps; they replace limestones that lie near 
the surface and sometimes come to form true veins. 
In most instances these processes of concentration do 
not go on at great depths beneath the surface, but are 
limited to the levels where the rain-water has a chance 
to penetrate; usually much less than half a mile down. 
Thus, although there are probably instances where 
beds or veins of iron ores may be found at the deepest 
levels at which we may hope to win them at practica¬ 
ble cost, say at a depth of two miles or so, it may be 
assumed that the supply of the metal will have to come 
from less than half that distance below the surface. 
In this regard, the occurrence of minable deposits of 
iron ore differs from that of the other important metals, 
4 


50 Man and the Earth 

the most of which, though likely to be richest at 
no great depth beneath the surface, continue in the 
rocks downward indefinitely beyond the limits where 
they may be won. 

Though the available iron ores are, as a whole, not 
to be reckoned on in great depths, and the store is thus 
much limited, their generally bedded nature and the 
great horizontal extension which comes from this ar¬ 
rangement afford an abundance of the material found 
in no other metalliferous deposits sought by the miner. 
The total amount of these minable iron ores, when 
their exploitation began, probably much exceeds all 
the other mineral deposits, excluding coal, that have 
been sought in the earth. The amount of these iron 
ores still available is very great, doubtless many times, 
perhaps twenty-fold, as great as has been won to use. 
Yet we see already that on the continent of Europe the 
fields long in service are beginning to be exhausted. 
Great Britain has practically consumed its store, which 
a century ago seemed ample. Essentially all the supply 
for its furnaces is now imported. The supply from the 
Mediterranean, that promised to be inexhaustible, can¬ 
not endure for many decades to come. The same is 
the condition of the ore districts of central Europe; 
at the rate of the increasing demand they are not likely 
to afford a source of supply a hundred years. There re¬ 
main extensive deposits of rich ores in the Scandina¬ 
vian peninsula and in fields on the confines of Belgium 
and France which have hardly begun to be drawn 
upon, yet it is evident that at anything like the present 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 51 

rate of increase in the consumption of metallic iron 
the European sources of its ores are not likely to en¬ 
dure for a century. 

In North America, the conditions are more promis¬ 
ing for a long continuance of iron production than in 
Europe. In the region east of the Appalachians, in¬ 
cluding New England and the maritime provinces, the 
originally rather scanty stores of the metal have, save 
in Nova Scotia, proved unprofitable sources of supply. 
It is evident that they may be left out of account in 
any reckonings of a large nature. On the Pacific slope, 
though our knowledge of the matter is less complete, 
it appears unlikely that the deposits have any consider¬ 
able value in relation to the world-needs. In the 
central district of the Cordilleras of North America 
the scanty evidence as yet gathered seems to indicate 
the promise of considerable bodies of iron ore, but the 
greater part of them lie far removed from coal of a 
quality suited f o the operation of smelting, and, there¬ 
fore, to be available, save for local use, only when the 
price of the metal is far higher than at present. 

The best-placed field for the production of iron in 
North America or, save that in northern China, in 
the world, is in the central section of the Mississippi 
valley, mainly between the great river and the Appala¬ 
chian system of mountains and northward beyond the 
great lakes to the head-waters of the streams flowing 
into Hudson’s Bay. As a whole, this area is not only 
exceptionally rich in iron ores, but the deposits lie near 
enough to coals of a quality suitable for smelting them. 


Man and the Earth 


S 2 

Save as before mentioned, in China there is clearly no 
other region in the world where the physical condi¬ 
tions are, on the whole, so favorable for the cheap 
production of the metal and its ready transportation 
to the principal markets; it is a question, however, if 
the store will supply the demands of the future. 

The more important iron ores of the central trough 
of North America may be roughly divided into two 
geological groups — those of the region to the north 
and west of the upper Great Lakes, and those of the 
region south of the Ohio. The Great Lakes group 
mainly consists of deposits contained in the older 
rocks, those which have been greatly altered by chemi¬ 
cal changes, so that the original oxides of iron, proba¬ 
bly once bedded, have been dissolved and reconstructed, 
with the result that they are now accumulated in masses 
of limited area of exceptional richness. When, some 
twenty years ago, these ores in the region about the 
shores of Lake Michigan began to be extensively de¬ 
veloped, it was generally believed that the field was 
practically inexhaustible, that it would withstand for 
centuries any demand that could reasonably be ex¬ 
pected. At the present time good judges'are reckoning 
the longevity of these mines by decades. A conserv¬ 
ative view of the situation is that at anything like the 
present output of the ores the existing production 
cannot be maintained for fifty years. It is true that 
there is much unexplored territory hidden from the 
eager and keen-eyed scouts who have traversed the 
wilderness about the developed mines, but it seems 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 53 

altogether improbable that discoveries of unknown 
fields will be found sufficient to tenfold the known ores 
of this region between the Great Lakes and the Arctic 
circle. The geological features of the region jnake 
this reckoning almost certain; add to these considera¬ 
tions that the demand for these ores is rapidly increas¬ 
ing, and we are forced to the conclusion that this, the 
most promising field discovered in the last century, 
and, most likely, all things considered, the best ever to 
be found, will not continue its production for a cen¬ 
tury to come. 

A similar story is to be told concerning the ores 
south of the Ohio, those which in Alabama, Tennessee, 
and southwestern Virginia, in the time of the swiftly 
developed iron industry of the Birmingham district, 
promised to revolutionize in future years the industry 
of this country. The greater part of these deposits 
are bedded, mostly in the upper part of the Silurian 
system of rocks. Those beds belonging in the Clinton 
period consist of limestone which has been converted 
into iron ores by the downward leaching of the surface 
water, carrying iron oxides in solution in the manner 
before noted; when this carbonated water comes in 
contact with lime it lays down the iron oxide it con¬ 
tains, takes up lime, for which it has a greater affinity, 
and goes on its way. In this manner, in the course of 
time, all of the bed of limestone to which the rain¬ 
water finds access is converted into siderite, a car¬ 
bonate of iron and lime in which the proportion of 
iron to the other materials is rarely greater than 


54 Man and the Earth 

thirty per cent. The further access of water and air 
to the deposit will in time remove a considerable 
part of the remaining lime and effect other changes 
which bring the mass into the condition of limonite, 
brown ore, or haematite red ore, in the more con¬ 
centrated forms of which the proportion of iron may 
be increased to from forty to sixty per cent, of the 
mass. 

The bedded Clinton ores of the southern states 
have very generally been tilted by the mountain-build¬ 
ing processes which have operated in that region, so 
that we have the deposits appearing at the surface, 
the beds plunging downwardly, and after the miner has 
followed them for, say, 1,000 feet on the slope, he is 
several hundred feet below the surface. When a bed of 
ore of a given thickness was discovered that in shallow 
pits yielded iron at the rate of forty per cent, or more of 
metal, the natural mistake was made that the deposit 
could be followed downward with like richness as far 
as mining skill could carry the openings. Experience 
has shown that as soon as the workings are extended 
much below the zone of movement of the rain-water 
the beds are found in their original condition of lime¬ 
stones; so that in place of a workable belt of some 
miles in width the limit of profit is within a few 
thousand feet of the surface. The result is that 
the expectations concerning the Clinton field of the 
South which seemed to most observers, even to those 
who were fairly well informed, to be inexhaustible, 
have to be greatly reduced — in such measure, indeed, 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 55 

that the resources which were expected to endure for 
centuries cannot safely be reckoned on for more than 
half a hundred years. It may be conjectured by those 
who find comfort in mere possibilities that we know 
so little of the under-earth, even in our own relatively 
well-known land, that these reckonings are vain, and 
that surprises await us in the way of discoveries 
undreamt of. The uninstructed only will be inclined 
to make such guesses. It is a fact that all the iron 
fields of this country of sufficient extent to have 
a wide-reaching importance have been known for thirty 
years or more. Later knowledge has only defined 
their bounds. It is in a high measure improbable 
that within the limits of the United States any new 
fields of notable value remain to be discovered. 

We know much less of the iron resources of the 
other continents than of Europe and America. The 
only other known field in any of them which promises 
a yield of general importance is that in China, where 
over a wide area there is evidence of iron ores along 
with good coal for smelting, and under conditions of 
climate and of labor which promise a cheaper product 
than has been obtained in any other district. This 
combination of resources is one of the several features 
which give the present struggle between Japan and 
Russia a world-wide meaning, for on their control 
depends in large measure the economic mastery of 
the Pacific Ocean. They are very soon to make China 
the manufacturing centre of that realm. The state that 
commands the mineral stores of that kingdom may 


5 6 Man and the Earth 

find its way to master the world even more effectively 
than did Rome in her time. 

As for the other parts of Asia and the continents 
of Australia, Africa, and South America, relatively 
little is known of their resources in the way of iron, 
save that owing to the prevailing lack of coal deposits 
fit for use in blast-furnaces, the ores here and there 
abundant cannot generally be made to serve except at 
much higher prices of the metal than now hold. As 
for the eventual product of these lands, we may make 
a rough reckoning in the assumption that, area for 
area, they are no richer, and probably less rich, than 
Europe and North America. If we accept the conclu¬ 
sion that the iron ores of those lands are not likely 
to continue to be sources of large and cheap supply 
beyond the present century, we may fairly assume that 
the world, as a whole, will not have access to the metal 
at anything like the present cost in terms of labor 
which prevail at present. 

It is not to be supposed that the iron age will sud¬ 
denly pass away; its passage doubtless will be gradual. 
The deposits other than those of China which can pro¬ 
duce iron at the present low labor cost will almost 
certainly be exhausted within one hundred years. 
Those of China may last for a similar term after they 
become the centre of a large industry. Then the cost 
of production will gradually increase as the lower- 
grade ores and those remote from coal come into use. 
In the end we shall have to resort to concentrating 
processes by which the iron ore is separated from the 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 57 

rock in which it is disseminated as grains. This up¬ 
ward grade in cost means a downward grade in the 
utility of the metal in the service of man. Finally, it 
may be some centuries from now, but surely, we shall 
be forced to economy in the use of the metal such as 
was exercised by folk two hundred years ago, when, 
save for what went down at sea, or rusted back to earth, 
none of it was lost to the arts. In this stage, when 
it becomes again a precious metal, iron may continue 
to be the helper of man for an indefinite period, but 
its power for help will be greatly diminished. 

In the case of copper the outlook is much the same 
as with iron. The sources of supply are very much 
rarer and the total amount of-the metal in the crust 
of the earth is probably not the thousandth part of 
that of iron. Athough it has been the object of close 
and well-guided search through North America, and 
of innumerable essays in mining, there are no deposits 
of any importance now worked in the region east of 
the Rocky Mountains except on Lake Superior, and 
in the western district there are but two limited fields 
of considerable production, or even of much promise, 
within the bounds of the United States. And yet the 
Cordilleran system in North and South America is 
the region in which this metal appears to be most 
generally diffused and to exist in the largest aggre¬ 
gations. On the other continents we find a like spar¬ 
sity of copper-bearing ores of the economic value of 
the present sources of supply. Only the Spanish mines 
of Europe are the seat of a considerable production; no 


Man and the Earth 


58 

Asiatic or African fields comparable to those of Lake 
Superior, Butte, or Arizona have been found, and in 
South America the only successful mines are in the 
central district of the Cordilleras. It appears that the 
supply of copper will be reduced to a point where its 
service to the arts will be seriously limited before there 
is a like reduction in the supply of iron. In the last- 
named metal there exists a considerable leeway in the 
saving that will be made in scrap material as soon as 
the price rises to, say, fifty dollars per ton; because 
of the present relatively high price, about two hundred 
dollars per ton, there is no savable loss in copper. 

We can look upon the approaching exhaustion of 
the sources of copper supply with less apprehension 
than in the case of iron, for the reason that, useful as 
the metal is in manifold ways, it is not indispensable 
or even very necessary in our arts except in the trans¬ 
mission of electric power, and even then substitution 
is possible. Save for this use the economic world could 
soon adjust itself to the loss of this once indispensable 
metal. 

Turning now to the question of the possible substi¬ 
tution for iron and copper, we find ourselves in face 
of the interesting problem of aluminum. This metal 
is in form of silicates, the base of all our clays, and 
of the feldspars from which they are mainly derived, 
as well as of many other common mineral species. 
Owing to the abundance of these materials, the 
amount of aluminum accessible to man provided he 
breaks up its union with silicon, which needs to be 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 59 

done because the substance is never found in the me¬ 
tallic or unoxidized state, is perhaps some thousands 
of times as great as the iron contained in the concen¬ 
trated form of beds or veins. Every clay bank is a 
possible source of the material. Great sections of the 
stratified rocks are in part composed of it, and all the 
feldspathic massive rocks, such as the typical granites, 
contain a like store of the metal. 

In its qualities aluminum is admirably adapted to 
serve the greater part of the needs now served by iron 
and copper. It is relatively very light, but for its 
weight admirably strong, rigid, tough, and elastic; 
it is a good conductor of electricity; it does not oxidize 
or rust as readily as those metals. It meets practi¬ 
cally all the uses of the constructive arts; it is better 
than steel for the greater number of them. In the 
hulls of ships it would spare a large part of the weight 
in the hulls and machinery, and would greatly increase 
the cargo-carrying power. We readily see that an 
aluminum age would carry us almost as far beyond 
that of iron as we advanced when that metal replaced 
bronze in the mechanic arts. Why, then, as we have 
learned how to separate this admirable substance from 
its union with oxygen, may we not extend its use, 
thereby dismissing all fears that our successors of the 
centuries to come are to lack a fit share of the metals 
necessary for economic success ? 

To comprehend the economic situation of aluminum 
we have to note that though the metal has long been 
known and a great deal of experiment has been devoted 


6 o 


Man and the 'Earth 

to cheapening the cost of producing it, an inevitable 
difficulty in obtaining it from ordinary clays is en¬ 
countered in the firmness of the grip which the atoms 
of silicon have upon those of the metal in the com¬ 
pound. To pull these units apart and to send those of 
silicon on some other errand than a union with the 
aluminum atoms, requires an amount of energy in 
the form of heat and a combination of the ores with 
other materials very many times greater than is re¬ 
quired to do like work with the oxides of iron. The 
result is that so far as this process has yet attained, 
the cost in terms of power incurred in making a ton 
of aluminum is, under the most favorable circum¬ 
stances, very much greater than in the case of a like 
amount of metallic iron. It may be granted that future 
improvements of the process of winning the material 
will much reduce the cost of its production. *The fact 
that within fifty years the market price of aluminum 
has been reduced to about one-tenth of what it was 
favors this supposition. Yet we have to bear in mind 
the fundamental difficulty that it requires many times 
as much energy in the form of heat to part the other 
atoms from the metal as it does in the case of iron, 
and that so far as we can see the work has practically 
to be done in electric furnaces on a small scale and 
with steps that entail a large amount of labor. He 
would be a confident man who, on the basis of compu¬ 
tation, looked forward to a time when aluminum could 
be economically produced on a large scale for less 
than two hundred dollars per ton. 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 6 1 

To bring the cost of aluminum down to, say, ten 
times that of pig-iron, and to produce it on a scale in 
any important measure to compete with iron, even at 
* double its present price, it will be necessary to reduce 
the cost of electric power to a small fraction of the 
present cost of production. This can probably be done, 
for there are innumerable places where great water- 
powers are unused which can be turned to this ac¬ 
count at a cost, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of 
what it would be if won from coal. This, however, 
will meet but a part of the difficulty, for the alumi¬ 
num-bearing ores rarely occur in such quantity and 
purity that they may be directly used in a furnace, 
and in this condition are much less extensively de¬ 
veloped than those of iron. Moreover, we do not as 
yet know how to win them from ordinary clays. Thus 
with any methods now conceivable we have to reckon 
that while aluminum is likely in time to take the domi¬ 
nant place now held by iron, it will do so at a cost in 
terms of labor far higher than what men now pay for 
their capital metal. Nevertheless, the difference is not 
likely to be so great that the mechanical foundations of 
our economic civilization will be endangered. 

As for the other metals now in use, gold is of most 
popular interest. Its place in the public mind and in 
the peculiar work of measuring exchanges is no gauge 
of its essential value. The metal has not a single 
property that makes it necessary in the mechanic arts, 
and its special delegated work in measuring values 
could be accomplished by other agents. In the course 


6 2 


Man and the Earth 


of the present century it may be necessary to seek 
other means of effecting such measurements. There is 
a large quantity of gold accessible in this world at about 
the cost in terms of labor which exists at present. 
The metal is very widely diffused not only in the 
earth, but in the waters of the sea as well. The pro¬ 
cesses of mining it are constantly increasing in effi¬ 
ciency and decreasing in cost per unit of the material 
won. There is little doubt that these changes, by add¬ 
ing to the store of gold beyond the needs of civiliza¬ 
tion, are even now depreciating the metal, and the 
effect is shown in the rise of prices of things for which 
it is exchanged; a rise which in face of lessened costs 
of production can only be accounted for by the ex¬ 
cessive supply of the agent of exchange. 

As the use of gold in ways that lead to its loss is 
not extensive, the gain in the world’s store of it is 
going forward so rapidly that, considering the contri¬ 
butions from the land alone, it seems likely that we 
shall, within a few decades, contrive some other means 
of measuring values than by the ancient device of bal¬ 
ancing them against a substance of which the supply is 
excessive. 

Should the much-talked-of method of winning gold 
from sea-water by any contrivance prove economically 
successful, the increase in the stock of the metal might 
quickly become so great as to break down its value 
as money. The effect would be speedier than that 
attendant on the increase in the quantity of silver in the 
world’s store due to the development pf the Com- 


The Exhaustion of the Metals 63 

stock and other American mines about twenty years 
ago. Fortunately for the convenience of man, it 
seems unlikely that a process of obtaining gold from 
sea-water at a profit will be contrived. While we 
have little trustworthy information concerning the 
supply of this gold, or the state in which it exists in 
the ocean, it appears unlikely that it ever amounts to 
more than about five cents’ worth in a cubic metre, and 
there is no way known in which it can be won at any¬ 
thing like that cost. 

Silver, the noble companion of gold in the work of 
measuring the goods of men, is now a forlorn element, 
a very pauper among the metals. At any price at 
which it can be produced, it is valueless in the arts. 
What station it retains is due to sentimental considera¬ 
tions which are likely soon to pass away. In a century, 
save for its use for fractional currency, it is likely to 
be quite neglected; it is, therefore, not necessary to 
consider the question of its supply in the time to come. 

Lead, as before noted, has its largest use in small 
projectiles — it is to be hoped an evitable use. It is, 
however, serviceable as a basis for various solders and 
as an agent in joining sections of metal pipes — as well 
as for making an objectionable group of paints. If war 
is to be continued for a century to come at the rate of 
the past century, it is likely that the stores of lead 
ores will be seriously trenched upon. Although it 
occurs in very numerous areas, in many countries, 
and in a great variety of geological formations, it is 
rarely found in extensive deposits, so that the mines 


Man and the Earth 


64 

producing it are generally soon exhausted. Thus fifty 
years ago there were seats of large production east of 
the Mississippi or near its banks; at the present time 
the amount produced in that region is insignificant. 
Moreover, until the recent fall in the price of silver, 
lead has been largely a by-product obtained in mining 
the more precious metal under conditions which would 
not otherwise have admitted of its being mined. 

Tin has a singular place in the mechanic arts; it is 
but little used by itself, but serves mainly to give a 
coating to iron, thereby preventing rust. The distribu¬ 
tion of this metal is peculiar. So far, though the search 
for it has been well carried on, it has been found in 
profitable quantities only in Eurasia and the Australian 
realm. It occurs here and there in the Americas, but it 
has never rewarded continuous mining. The evidence 
is clearly to the effect that it cannot long be supplied 
in quantities or at a price which will render it service¬ 
able in the arts. It is not likely that it will hold its 
place through this century. 

Zinc is possibly more important than tin; it serves 
a variety of uses as sheet metal as well as a coating of 
iron to avoid rusting; it is also in an oxidized form of 
decided value as a paint, but in all these services to 
the arts it is replaceable by other metals. The distribu¬ 
tion of its ores is wide and their abundance considerable. 
They are found to a great extent in veins which hold 
their contents of the metal in the extreme depth of 
mining work. The general conditions point to the con¬ 
clusion that this substance is one of the last of the 


"The Exhaustion of the Metals 65 

underground values to be exhausted. Yet, as it is 
mainly to be won as a by-product of silver, lead, etc., 
the duration of the supply is probable dependent upon 
the production of these metals. 

Among the minor metals of special and important 
value, irreplaceable in the arts so far as we can see, 
there are few which give the forecaster concern. 
Mercury is imperatively needed in mirrors and in a 
wide range of scientific instruments such as thermome¬ 
ters and barometers, as well as in the processes of 
amalgamation by which the greater part of the gold 
supply is won from ores. This metal is scantily and 
peculiarly distributed. There are less than a half- 
dozen places in the world where it is known to occur 
in sufficient quantities to repay the miner, and none 
of these deposits give promise of long endurance. It 
is, indeed, likely that the first important deprivation 
to be encountered in the approaching exhaustion of 
metallic stores will be of this substance. A like appre¬ 
hension is due in the case of platinum. This metal 
is peculiarly necessary to the chemist, as it alone has 
the needed resistance both to heat and acids, such as 
is required in a large part of his laboratory experi¬ 
ments, as well as in some processes of manufactur¬ 
ing. Thorium, which serves in the manufacturing 
of the “ mantles ” of incandescent lamps, as well 
as sundry other substances needed in particular arts, 
are about as unpromising for the future as those above 
noted, but they need no further mention because 
it is likely that they may be replaced, or, at the worst, 
5 


66 Man and the Earth 

the deprivation will not be serious if they are lost to 
the arts. 

Of the earth substances which afford other than 
metallic products, the number is so great that they 
cannot all be considered here. Perhaps the most im¬ 
portant of these, for it touches on a host of common 
arts, is sulphur, which, as is well known, finds its 
most important use as sulphuric acid. This substance 
comes to our hands from two sources, in the shape 
of the yellow mineral of the name, and, in larger share, 
from what is familiarly known as iron pyrite. To one 
or the other of these sources we have to turn for the 
acid which is indispensable in a host of the arts that 
are linked in the chain of our economic civilization. 
It is even more indispensable than any of the metals 
except iron. What, then, is the chance of its supply 
being maintained? 

The future of the supply of sulphur is tolerably cer¬ 
tain. In all active volcanic districts there is a con¬ 
stant expulsion of sulphur vapors which form deposits 
that after the period of activity can be mined; in this 
and yet other ways the supply of the mineral in the 
native form is provided. Again, and more impor¬ 
tantly, it is produced from iron pyrite, a compound 
of sulphur and iron. This pyrite is of very general 
occurrence in the form of distinct veins and as crystals 
of the material scattered through rocks of all ages; 
the facts, in a word, point to the conclusion that of 
all the earth products which are useful in the arts, 
sulphuric acid will be one of the last to be exhausted. 


The Exhaustion of the Earth 67 

Nitrates, the source of nitric acid and the basis of 
gunpowder and hardly second to sulphur in impor¬ 
tance, rest on a more unstable basis of earth resources 
than any other. They exist in certain wery limited 
fields as nitrate of soda, which can readily be converted 
into nitrate of potash, “ saltpetre.” These nitrates are 
very soluble, and the chance of finding them in com¬ 
mercial quantities, except in recent deposits formed in 
desert countries, is small. The situation, however, is 
hopeful for the reason that the greater part of the 
air is composed of nitrogen, and though we have not 
learned how to convert it into serviceable form, we 
may trust our good helpers, the chemists, to learn how 
the bacteria do the work, and apply that or some other 
method to the task. 

There are many other earth substances helpful to 
man in his present economic estate, and many others 
will find their place in the arts. The substances that 
have been mentioned in this incomplete review are, so 
far as we can discover, the most important for the 
continued success of human endeavors. Some of 
these, as, for instance, the radium group, come just 
now trooping out of the dark — out of the great 
mystery of this seemingly commonplace world. What 
share they are to have in human events is not 
clear; yet because of our considerable knowledge of 
the materials of the earth which exist in notable 
quantities we may fairly reckon that the discoveries 
which await us are of rare elements and combina¬ 
tions, not, in many instances, likely, because of 


68 Man and the Earth 

their small quantity, to prove of great economic 
value. 

Beneath all these reckonings is the ancient question 
as to the transmutability of the elements. Shall we be 
able in time to find some way by which one of them 
can be transformed into another? To this there is, 
as yet, no final answer, but all our knowledge points 
to the conclusion that even if an atom be actually 
changeable in nature, such is the persistency with which 
it clings to the shape in which we find it that it is idle 
to hope for conditions where the alteration can be 
accomplished in a way to serve our needs. We have 
to accept the hypothesis of unchangeable elements as 
a basis for our economic concepts of the earth and be 
thankful for the large gifts they bring, confident that 
the spirit of man may win his needs from the great 
store. 


IV 

THE UNWON LANDS 

B Y far the greater part of the food now at the ser¬ 
vice of man is derived from lands which have 
been easily subjugated, needing only the axe 
and the plough to fit them for use. Probably not more 
than five per cent, of the area of tilled or pastured 
fields has been won by the devices of the engineer 
from the arid deserts or those sterilized by an excess 
of water. In Asia, from immemorial time, consider¬ 
able regions have been irrigated; much irrigation 
also has been done in Africa and along the north shore 
of the Mediterranean; a fair beginning has been made 
in North America. But probably not the fiftieth part 
of the lands which can be bettered by the application 
of water now going unused to the sea has been brought 
to the service of man. The conditions are the same 
as regards the areas which are over-watered as they 
are with the excessively dry lands, though the dis¬ 
tribution of the fields is different. The process of 
drainage has been essentially limited to northeastern 
Europe; only here and there and in a relatively small 
way has it been applied elsewhere. The share of these 
inundated lands which has been won to tillage is even 


70 Man and the Earth 

less than in the case of those which are excessively 
arid. From these two groups of fields we are to find 
the source of the food for a large part of the increase 
in population which we may expect in the centuries to 
come. We shall now note the conditions of the re- 
claimable arid deserts, reserving our glance at the 
swamps and marshes for the next chapter. 

All arid deserts owe their lack of rainfall to the 
existing distribution of the seas in relation to the lands, 
to the direction of the winds and the ocean currents 
they impel, and the position of mountain ranges in 
relation to their movement. It is a safe general asser¬ 
tion that these wastes are, in a geological sense, tempo¬ 
rary, having been at various times in the past well 
watered and likely to be so again in the course of the 
unending geographic change to which the earth is sub¬ 
jected. Thus in the arid district of the Cordilleras of 
North America — the so-called Rocky Mountains — 
it is clear that a time of great rainfall during the 
early Tertiary period was followed by long-enduring 
drought. This was succeeded by a return to humid 
conditions of the glacial epoch, and, finally, the exist¬ 
ing state of scanty rainfall was established. The 
Sahara and other arid regions exhibit like evidence 
of alternations of wet and dry ages. There are some 
reasons for supposing that, on the whole, the conti¬ 
nents are at present more than usually arid. 

During the periods of considerable rainfall, say 
above twenty inches per year, the streams somewhat 
rapidly bear away to the sea all the broken-up rock 


The Unwon Lands 71 

which is dislodged by weakening processes. The soil 
which represents so much of this rocky matter as is not 
taken into solution creeps down the slopes on which 
it lies and is carried away by the streams. These, 
normally, have their beds on the firm-set rock. When 
the rainfall decreases to less than twenty inches the 
precipitation is apt to be limited to rain-storms of tor¬ 
rential nature — the so-called cloud-bursts — which 
detach the weakened fragments of stone from the 
highlands and bear them to the valleys where the small 
and inefficient streams are unable to convey the de¬ 
tritus onward to the sea. The result is that the val¬ 
leys become filled up with debris, often, as in the 
Cordilleras, to the depth of thousands of feet. 

Even in the most sterile deserts there is some rain¬ 
fall. It is, indeed, doubtful if in any part of the world 
the precipitation is, on the average, less than three 
inches per annum. Although this is quite insuffi¬ 
cient to maintain any plants, it is enough to bring 
about the chemical changes necessary to prepare the 
earth substance for their uses. The result is that all 
deserts, however barren they may be, have incipient 
soils which need but water to become surpassingly 
fertile, rich beyond the best of those developed in or¬ 
dinarily humid climates. We see this in the familiar 
phenomena of the so-called alkali deserts, where the 
ground is often encrusted to the depth of an inch or 
more with a coating of a varied nature composed 
of lime, potash, soda, etc., just such materials as plants 
need, but there present in excessive quantities. In 


72 Man and the Earth 

fact, the desert soils, if they are not mere blown sands, 
are so rich in the soluble mineral substances that, when 
at first irrigated, they are, for a time, unfit for tillage, 
and required to be subjected to successive inundations, 
so as to leach out the excess of what serves as food for 
plants. Many experiments in irrigation have been 
hastily abandoned because those in charge of the work 
found that for all their toil and pains the well-watered 
fields would "bring no returns because they were sur¬ 
charged with richness. 

It is worth while to look for a moment more 
clearly at the conditions which lead to the formation 
of an “ alkali ” coating in arid lands, for it tells us 
much of value as to their conditions. The important 
facts are these: When the rainfall is very small in 
quantity, say less than ten inches in a year, there is 
little of that circulation of water through the soil 
which under ordinary humid conditions brings about 
a constant removal of the dissolved mineral substan¬ 
ces through the springs to the open streams. When, 
by a chance rain, the desert ground becomes soaked 
with water, the dry air quickly evaporates what of it 
is upon the surface, leaving the mineral materials it 
contained. When the deeper-lying water is drawn 
up to the surface to replace that which has been vapor¬ 
ized, it in turn goes away, and its load is continuously 
added to the coating. The process is essentially like 
that of a lamp wick when the fluid is taken into the air 
by burning and its solid contents left as a coating at 
the point where it is vaporized. 


1 The Unwon Lands 


73 

In desert countries this excess of soluble materials 
extends throughout all the earth to which the water 
penetrates. Commonly the process of irrigation does 
no more than reduce the store to the point where it 
does not injure plants to the depth to which their roots 
descend, say for a foot or two downward; below 
that level the original condition remains. The result 
is that whenever the amount of water applied to the 
field is not sufficient, the evaporating process draws the 
fluid from the lower level and the field becomes again 
excessively charged with soluble mineral matter; it 
may, indeed, form anew an alkali crust. Thus in 
Egypt, when an effort was made to reduce the amount 
of irrigation water to a share which on ordinary soil 
would suffice for the nurture of crops, the result was 
that the surface again became covered with the crust 
and the crops perished. The facts show that the amount 
of water needed by desert soils is considerably greater 
than that required for successful agriculture on fields 
supplied directly by the rainfall. 

So far as the arid deserts of the world can be irri¬ 
gated they will afford, as experience makes plain, a 
group of opportunities for agriculture such as are not 
found in regions of the greatest natural fertility de¬ 
pendent on the chance of rain. In taking account of 
these peculiar advantages, we have first to note that, 
given the suitable temperature, the crop-giving value 
of a soil is in proportion to the amount of sunshine 
and the supply of water furnished at the time re¬ 
quired for the growth of plants. When the needed 


74 Man and the Earth 

water comes directly from the sky, the sunshine is in¬ 
terrupted, and if the rainfall is ever so little delayed 
beyond the critical time when the plants need it, their 
growth is hindered. It may be roughly estimated 
that at the rate of growth in an irrigated desert, such 
as we find in Utah, the yield of an acre, owing to these 
advantages, is likely to be about twice as great as in a 
like area in a humid district such as Illinois. In the 
more fertile portions of the tropical and sub-tropical 
regions irrigation often makes it possible to raise three 
crops a year where but one could be assured by the 
direct rainfall. 

The permanence in the fertility of irrigable soils, in 
a measure impossible to attain in those of ordinary 
character, is brought about by two features in their 
history. The first of these is that owing to the con¬ 
trollability of the supply of water the washing of the 
soil into the rivers can be entirely avoided. The second 
is that owing to the large amount of soluble mineral 
matter in the sub-soil, it is easy to restore the waste 
brought about by cropping, by deeper tillage, or by the 
disuse of irrigation for a short period, so as to allow 
the sun to draw up the lower water with its store of 
plant food in the manner just above described. As 
possessions of the race, the redeemed deserts are of 
far more value than the richest naturally well-watered 
fields. They are likely to afford sustenance to man 
long after the soils lying on steep slopes have gone 
away to the sea. Turning now to the question of the 
irrigable desert lands, let us note the conditions in 


The Unwon Lands 75 

which they occur and, as far as possible, the extent to 
which they may be won to tillage. 

Although the most arid deserts have some rainfall, 
often enough if it were properly distributed to nurture 
certain crops, it may be accepted as a general fact that 
only under peculiar conditions can effective irrigation 
be obtained by storing the water that falls within the 
limits of the tilled country. The supply has to be found 
in streams which arise in districts having a larger pre¬ 
cipitation and flow toward the less-watered lands. 
Sometimes, as in the valleys of the Cordilleras and of 
many other prevailingly arid mountainous regions, the 
source of supply may be in the nearby uplands, where 
the winter’s snow is preserved into the summer to fill 
the torrent beds by its melting. Again, as in the case 
of the Nile, the Twin Rivers of Mesopotamia, or the 
Colorado and many rivers of the Cordilleras, the 
stream flows from a region of considerable rainfall 
to one of much less precipitation, so that the desert 
may profit by climatal conditions quite unlike its own. 
It is in this state of affairs that we find the largest 
opportunities for irrigation at the least cost of the 
necessary engineering work. 

As to the amount of tillable land that can be won by 
irrigation from the arid districts, only a very general 
estimate can as yet be made. It is, however, evident 
at a glance that only a small part of the arid deserts 
of the several continents afford enough water at the 
command of the engineer to make irrigation possible. 
Thus in Asia, the whole of the central high-lying arid 


Man and the Earth 


76 

field is essentially waterless as is the Arabian penin¬ 
sula. The most promising fields for the development of 
the method are in the drainage of the Caspian and the 
Aral dead seas and in the valleys of the Euphrates and 
Tigris. Irrigation to supplement the rainfall in some¬ 
what arid fields is extensively applicable in China and 
in Siberia, and has already been greatly developed in 
India. It is not probable that extensive new conquests 
can be made from the true deserts of Asia, but much 
can be done to recover the ground in Persia and else¬ 
where which, anciently irrigated, has in modern times 
been allowed to return to its wilderness state. The 
valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, once the seat 
of a great population, form the most tempting field in 
the world to the irrigation engineer. It seems likely 
that, next to the Nile, here will be found the greatest 
opportunity to win the bread of a people from what 
are now mainly sterile fields. If the irrigation of the 
whole of Asia should be brought to the condition in 
which it has been developed in British India, there is 
reason to believe that there would be an increment 
of the food supply sufficient for the support of an 
additional population on that continent amounting 
to somewhere between two and four hundred mil¬ 
lions — the greater part of the increase being in 
western China. 

Europe has no deserts, and the considerable local 
systems of irrigation are intended to do no more than 
supplement the rainfall. This work is as yet imper¬ 
fectly carried out; many extensive regions on the 


The Unwon Lands 


77 

Mediterranean face of the land well suited to this aux¬ 
iliary method have never had their streams turned to 
account. The Aryan race, in general, for all that it 
takes its name from the plough and is characteristically 
soil-tilling, shows no native sense of the use of water 
on the land. It is only when folk of this race have 
come in contact with people bred in desert conditions, 
such as the Arabs, that they have ever much concerned 
themselves with projects for leading streams upon the 
land. It is, perhaps, due to this lack of race experi¬ 
ence that we owe the slight development of irrigation 
in Europe and among the descendants of its stocks in 
other lands. If the Semitic folk had come to mastery, 
the fields of this world would doubtless be much bet¬ 
ter watered than they are under Aryan control. 

Africa has, in the Nile valley, the field where the 
most important conquests from the desert can be 
made. The conditions of the problem are so interest¬ 
ing that they demand especial treatment and have, 
therefore, been made the subject of a separate chapter. 
Save for this part of Africa, no other large field of 
desert appears to be irrigable. The remainder of the 
Sahara, in the later Tertiary time well watered, is 
doomed to sterility until the climatal equations are 
again subjected to one of the many revolutions which 
have dried up realms to deserts and turned once water¬ 
less wastes to green pastures. The other valleys of the 
continent appear from the imperfect accounts of them 
to be unpromising regions for the work of the irriga¬ 
tion engineer. Where, as in parts of the extreme 


Man and the Earth 


78 

South, the country is so arid as to need artificial water¬ 
ing, there are no streams of sufficient volume to serve 
large areas. 

In Australia, because of the prevailing arid char¬ 
acter of the greater part of the surface, there are no 
very extensive areas whereto water can be brought; 
yet the southern and eastern faces of the continent 
afford some considerable fields where the process is 
applicable. From the general conditions of the country 
it seems likely that the food-yielding capacity of this 
land may be more than doubled by the systematic 
distribution of its scanty rainfall — scantier than that 
of any other continent. At best, however, this realm 
is for its area the least hospitable of all to man. It is 
doubtful if with all the resources of engineering skill 
it can be made to support, in the present scale of sub¬ 
sistence of its folk, more than one hundred million 
people. 

It is in the Americas, particularly the northern of 
the twin continents, that we find the most numerous 
and extensive fields which can be won from desert 
conditions to fertility. The reason for this is to be 
found in the long mountain system which borders the 
Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Patagonia; though it 
is interrupted in the Isthmus of Darien, it is so nearly 
continuous that it may be regarded as one chain of 
elevations — by far the longest in the world that has 
a like unbroken nature. This belt of elevations lies 
across the general course of the winds with the result 
that in North America they serve to bring about the 


The Unwon Lands 79 

principal rainfall on the western slope of the ranges, 
and in South America to fix it mainly on the Eastern 
side of the barriers. The actions are not quite as sim¬ 
ple as here stated, for there are sundry local compli¬ 
cations arising from details of the air currents and the 
height of the ranges, but for our purpose these details 
may be neglected. 

The result of the condition, due to the systems of the 
winds and of the mountains, is that South America has 
a relatively narrow belt of arid land extending along 
the greater part of its western shore. In this section 
the natives, before the Spanish invasion, had developed 
a certain limited amount of irrigation. The conditions 
do not permit any extensive use of the method, for 
the streams crossing this arid belt are few and small. 
Moreover, the total area that could under more favor¬ 
able conditions be watered is too limited to have any 
general importance. South of the southern tropic on 
the eastern slopes of the Andean ranges, there is an 
extensive district which, though not an arid desert, 
is, after the manner of the great plainland of North 
America on the western side of the Mississippi valley, 
in need of irrigation to make it suitable for agriculture. 
Within the tropics the continent has a climate of a hu¬ 
mid character, so that artificial watering is not neces¬ 
sary to give it fertility, though in many parts of this 
district it would by avoiding the seasonal droughts 
much increase the returns of the fields. Thus, although 
South America has, with the exception of Europe, 
which is really but the western fringe of Asia, the 


8 o 


Man and the Earth 


smallest proportion of arid deserts of any of the great 
lands, it is likely to be in time the most extensive 
field of that form of irrigation which is used to sup¬ 
plement the rainfall where it is scanty or seasonably ill 
distributed. 

North America affords the most numerous and 
varied opportunities for the application of irrigation 
of any continent. No single valley has the possibili¬ 
ties of the Nile, but the aggregate flow of the many 
rivers which can be turned to account much exceeds 
that of the African stream, and the fields to be won 
are, save those of Mexico, all well beyond the tropics 
and, therefore, much better suited to the habit of our 
Germanic people than the Nilotic valley. In Mexico, 
the streams that may be used for irrigation purposes 
are of small volume, few of them deserving the name 
of rivers. Owing to the fact that the Spaniards from 
their contact with the Moors long ago acquired the 
custom of irrigating, their descendants and the Indians 
with whom they have mingled have brought the system 
of artificial watering nearly to perfection, with slender 
possibilities of further development. 

Within the limits of the United States there are 
four great valleys where the conditions lend them¬ 
selves admirably to irrigation, and numerous other 
lesser drainage systems where there are large but 
rather local possibilities of its application. These 
greater areas are those of the Rio Grande, the Col¬ 
orado, the Arkansas, and the upper Mississippi. Of 


The Unwon Lands 


81 


these, the Rio Grande is the least important; more¬ 
over, the water belonging to it is already so far led 
upon tilled fields that no considerable extension of the 
process is possible without extensive storage of the 
scanty floods in reservoirs — a doubtful resource in 
this valley, for the reason that the evaporation in the 
very dry climate is so great that most of the impounded 
water goes away to the air. In the Colorado River 
we have the most important stream that traverses the 
really desert section of the Cordilleras. In its con¬ 
ditions of supply and its journey from the mountains 
of Colorado to the sea, it more nearly resembles the 
Nile than any other great stream of this continent. In 
the high country where it has its source, the melting 
of the abundant snows affords a large flow during the 
summer season. In part, this water is available for 
fields above the Grand Canon, but in larger share it, 
so to speak, belongs to those of the lower, extremely 
arid, desert of Arizona. It will be no small engineer¬ 
ing feat to divert the tide of this river from the gorge 
through which it flows and to lead it upon the fields 
which are waiting the chance to bear the marvellous 
crops that sunshine and water will bring upon their 
rich soils. Yet it seems quite practicable to do this 
work, and the returns from some million acres of irri¬ 
gated land will repay the cost. 

In the upper Arkansas River we have a stream dis¬ 
charging into the Mississippi system of drainage 
which has its head in the same highlands as the Colo¬ 
rado and, like it, is nourished by the melting snows. 

6 


82 


Man and the Earth 

The opportunities of irrigation from this stream are 
less than in-the case of the Colorado, yet they are more 
readily available than in the case of that river. The 
fields they will win to fertility, already in part watered 
from its stream, are not completely arid, so that the 
ditches have but to supplement the rainfall. The 
ground to be won lies on the great western plain 
which, next to the mountains from New Mexico 
northward, has a precipitation which just grazes the 
amount necessary to support a scanty pasturage, but 
is scarce half what is necessary for tillage. 

By far the most important field for irrigation in 
North America is that of the upper Missouri and its 
numerous branches. In this system of valleys from 
the Platte upward to the head-waters of the streams, 
the rainfall, though sufficient in quantity, is not so 
seasonably distributed as to make agriculture safe. 
There is, even in the summer season, water enough in 
this system of rivers to supply the addition required 
for the crops on some million acres. In this valley 
there is, moreover, a remarkably good chance to store 
water by means of reservoirs. In common with the 
other streams of the arid parts of the Cordilleras, 
there is a lack of lakes such as make the vast oppor¬ 
tunity of the Nile, but there are many instances where 
the streams pass through narrow canons with a broad 
area of plains above the gorge affording excellent sites 
for water-retaining dams. The general structure of the 
Cordilleras makes these conditions very common, but 
in the excessively arid and hot regions of New Mexico, 


The Unwon Lands 83 

Arizona, and Nevada the small size of the streams and 
the very dry, hot climate make the process of retaining 
water generally impracticable. In the cool, and rela¬ 
tively humid, climate of the upper Missouri, where 
standing water is sealed by ice for six months of 
the year and the air is not very dry except in the 
growing season, it is profitable to retain the spring 
floods for summer use. 

On the Pacific slope of the continent the opportuni¬ 
ties for the irrigation of arid lands, except that af¬ 
forded by the Colorado, are relatively small. The 
greater part of what can be done there is in the way 
of supplementing the rainfall. In the drainage of the 
Oregon River there are some fields of arid desert which 
may be, in part, won to tillage by its abundant waters, 
and by irrigation projects, at present beyond the limits 
of the practicable, but well within the possibilities of 
the centuries to come, when the whole of its head- 
streams may thus be diverted to the enhancement of 
the food-giving resources of this region. Southward 
along the coast numerous streams may thus be used 
for the enlargement of the tillage area or for the bet¬ 
terment of the agriculture where else it would be but 
scanty. 

It is, as yet, impossible to estimate with any approach 
to accuracy the amount of arid land in the United 
States which can be won to the uses of man by irri¬ 
gation. It seems evident, however, that, including not 
only the free flow of the streams which can be thus 
turned to account, but also the possibilities of retain- 


84 Man and the Earth 

ing the waste water in reservoirs, there will be a gain 
in the food supply sufficient to provide for the needs of 
something like fifty million people. Besides this gain 
from the fields, which otherwise would be absolutely 
useless to man, we must count the great enhance¬ 
ment in the food-giving value of vastly more exten¬ 
sive areas where irrigation will be used to extend the 
yield now obtained from land which is accounted fer¬ 
tile. Nearly the whole surface of this country is under¬ 
watered in the growing season and is, moreover, 
liable to severe droughts which limit the yield of crops. 
It is a safe general statement that the average returns 
from the soil would be at least one-third greater 
than is now obtained, provided the farmers were able 
to supply their crops with water at the critical time 
of their growth. With forage crops the yield would 
be at least doubled by such a provision. We have 
proof of this in all our agriculture which has attained 
to the intensive state: thus in all high-grade market- 
gardens it is found advantageous to supply water, 
even by steam pumps, so that the need of the plants 
may surely be jnet. By the use of this means the 
production is doubled in quantity, and a certainty of 
returns assured. Although here and there this higher 
stage of tillage has begun in this country, the economic 
conditions do not yet justify it on a large scale or in 
ordinary fields devoted to the production of the great 
staples. Within a century, however, we may expect to 
see the process attain a great development, and to 
become a characteristic feature of our agriculture, with 


The Unwon Lands 85 

a gain in soil products which will near double the 
capacity of the land for sustaining man. 

In the fully developed state of the earth we may 
expect that most of its land-waters will no longer 
flow to the sea but will pass back to the air by evap¬ 
oration from irrigated fields. The effects of this pro¬ 
cess will be manifold and altogether advantageous. It 
will enhance the yield of all those regions where the 
rainfall is not so adjusted as to fit the needs of crops, 
say, at least, nine-tenths of the total area. It will very 
greatly increase the returns from the leaner soils 
where moisture is abundant, say on about half the sur¬ 
face of the lands, for there is little of the earth where 
with sun and water a fair yield cannot be obtained. 
In this estate of earth and man we may fairly reckon 
that the sphere will begin to escape from the danger 
which attends the excessively rapid passage of its soil 
materials to the sea. The disintegrated rock will, 
save in the districts of mountainous slopes, remain 
long enough on its journey to give its full value to 
vegetation. Moreover, in proportion to the develop¬ 
ment of irrigation, the yield of crops will become less 
variable. This is a most important point, for at pres¬ 
ent there is a very serious waste of human endeavor 
due to the lack of uniformity in return for a given 
amount of labor applied to tillage. This variation 
may, indeed, be termed the primal curse of agriculture. 
If it be removed that form of toil will enter into a new 
realm — that of a true art. 

The probable gain from the subjugation of the land- 


86 


Man and the Earth 


waters to the needs of man is not only to be found 
in the hundreds of millions of people who may there¬ 
by be fed, but in the better order of the earth for the 
uses of man, and in his bettered adjustment to its 
conditions. 


V 

LAND FROM THE WATERS 


W HEN, in the process of building the conti¬ 
nents, their surfaces are lifted above the 
plane of the sea, they normally became dry 
land, and, unless too arid, are fit for the uses of those 
flowering plants on which man depends for food. 
There are, however, a number of accidents which serve 
to retain a covering of water on these fields so as to 
make them unsuited to the uses of the higher plant 
life. The land may rise irregularly, leaving depressions 
on its surface which become lakes. Like depressions 
may be formed by the downward-sinking areas, by the 
process which geologists term folding. Again, glacial 
action, by the irregular wearing of the rocks or the 
curious irregular heaps of debris it leaves on the sur¬ 
face, creates a multitude of hollows, forming lakes, 
until they are converted into peat bogs. Yet again, in 
humid countries mosses and even reeds may by their 
matted vegetation hold the rainfall as in a sponge, so 
that even hillsides become mantled with the boggy 
covering. Still further, the sea-shores have the amphib¬ 
ious zone of the tides, half land and half water, where 
the two “ elements,” as the ancients termed them, 


88 


Man and the Earth 

strive for mastery. The result of these conditions is 
that, when the critic man comes to survey the lands 
and judge them in general very good, he has to note 
that much of their fields has not effectively escaped the 
primal realm of the waters — that there is still much 
for his arts to mend. 

It is surprising how large a part of the what-we-call 
land is so far occupied by water as to make it in its 
natural state unserviceable for agriculture. In the 
tropical regions these areas of bog and lake are least 
extensive; in that realm occupying probably not more 
than ten per cent, of the area. But in higher latitudes 
and in proportion as we approach the poles a greater 
part of the field is permanently inundated, so that from 
the parallels of 40° to the limits that climate sets on 
agriculture somewhere near one-fourth of the land area 
is in its primitive condition unsuited to the uses of man 
and has to be won to his service by the devices of the 
engineer. 

In Europe, because of the antiquity and high grade 
of its culture, the process of winning the inundated 
lands to use has already gone very far, so far, indeed, 
that in ten centuries the aspect of the land has been 
greatly changed. Thus in Great Britain, at the time 
of Alfred the Great, near one-third of the area of the 
island was beset with marshes or with lands of the 
bog type. These impenetrable swamps appear in large 
measure to have formed the boundaries of the separate 
little kingdoms of the Heptarchy, and to have been 
even more effective barriers than the open sea. The 


Land from the Waters 89 

redemption of these lands probably began in Saxon 
times, if not earlier, but it appears to have gone for¬ 
ward slowly until the reign of James I, when the 
population of England began to press upon the means 
of subsistence and the work of draining the fens was 
rapidly carried on. As an adventurer in this business 
Oliver Cromwell, it is said, had his first clash with his 
sovereign. Along with others he had an important 
drainage concession from the crown, one that was pecu¬ 
liarly favorable for the reason that a Dutch company 
had failed in the same undertaking. When Cromwell 
was successful and in a position to profit largely by his 
success, the impecunious Charles I appropriated a con¬ 
siderable part of his rightful gains. It is not unlikely 
that this action of the king had in the end to do with 
his discovery of the important fact that “ he had a joint 
in his neck.” 

In Holland this process of reclaiming inundated 
lands has been carried much further than in any other 
country. When agriculture began in this region about 
the mouth of the Rhine, probably not one-tenth of the 
land now tilled was fit for that use. What was not 
covered with morasses lay beneath the level of the tide. 
In some fifteen hundred years the stout-hearted folk 
have made the most signal conquest ever effected by 
man in this winning of a state from the waters of sea 
and land. Work of the same nature and hardly less 
extensive has been done all along the lowlands which 
border the North Sea and the Baltic. Thus the fields 
of northeastern Europe, in Great Britain, Ireland, the 


90 Man and the Earth 

Low Countries, north Germany, and Scandinavia, which 
now support the agriculture of at least thirty million 
hardy people, have been won from bogs, marshes, and 
the bottom of the sea — areas which in America, save 
in a local and unimportant way, have been quite 
overlooked. 

The task of winning land from the waters which 
has been so well done in northeastern Europe and, in 
some measure, throughout that so-called continent, is 
by no means completed. Even in Holland there are 
great works still under way which some time during 
the present century will make yet further additions of 
hundreds of square miles won from the shallows of the 
sea to its tillable fields. In Russia there are vast areas 
awaiting the drainage engineer to bring them to the 
service of man so that they may yield the food for 
millions of people. Even in Italy, that most ancient 
seat of high tillage and of crowded population, there 
are extensive projects for reclaiming inundated areas 
now under discussion. These facts show us that in the 
reserves of land to be won before the world is fully 
peopled, we have to reckon largely on the parts of it 
which are to be reduced to service by drainage. This 
reckoning is hard to make, for the reason that outside 
of Europe scarcely any attention has been given to the 
problems of drainage, so that but an approach to the 
truth is attainable. 

First let us note that the most extensive of the in¬ 
undated lands is the sea floor, and that from its shal¬ 
lower part next the land the important gains of Holland 


Land from the Waters 91 

have been made. The conditions which permit such 
winning are very common along most sea-shores; an 
embayed area of shallow water, where the tides have 
a considerable rise and fall, and where the winds are 
constant and strong enough to serve for pumping, is 
always available; but the bottom of the area to be 
drained must afford the materials for a fertile soil as 
it, in fact, very generally does. It is not imperatively 
necessary that the shallows lie on the shores of a tidal 
sea so long as windmills close set by the margin of the 
area to be drained will serve to lower and keep down 
the water; there then is only the simple question of 
time and cost to bring the dyke’s area into tillage. 

The conditions of embayed waters of no great depth, 
and bottoms that will be fertile when drained are nor¬ 
mally found about the mouths of the larger rivers. 
The reason for this is that a recent geological* acci¬ 
dent, the newest of all having a world-wide effect, 
consisted in a general rise of the sea to the extent of 
some hundred feet, due to the upward movement of 
a portion of the deep-sea floor. The gain of the sea 
on the land led to the flooding of the valleys of the 
greater rivers for a long distance upward from their 
ancient mouths; forming such great reentrants of the 
sea as we have well preserved in the admirable ex¬ 
amples of the Chesapeake and Delaware bays. In 
many cases these drowned valleys have been so far 
filled in with delta deposits, as in the case of the Mis¬ 
sissippi, that the alluvial plain again projects out into 
the sea as at its mouth and at the Nile; more com- 


g2 Man and the Earth 

monly there is an embayment, as in the case of Mobile 
Bay. In any event this inundated valley is certain to 
have more or less extensive areas of shallow water 
which, as in Holland, may be drained and turned to 
cultivated fields. 

Besides the land won from the sea by the plants 
which develop the marine marshes in the higher lati¬ 
tudes, we find in the tropics a group of trees known 
as mangroves which have an even more swift and 
effective method of capturing land in shallow em- 
bayments. These trees are fitted to grow in salt¬ 
water silt, submerged it may be by some feet at high 
tide. They have long runner-like branches which, as 
they grow, extend outward and downward into the 
water of the bays until they touch the bottom, where 
they take root and form new crowns and stems which 
in like manner send their runners further seaward. 
In this way a mangrove swamp will speedily close 
over a shallow bay even if it be some miles in 
width, covering it with a dense low forest. While 
the trees are thus marching outward, their seed, 
long cylinders in form, with grapples at their lower 
ends, catch on the bottom as they drift away from the 
plant that bore them, rapidly grow to the surface of 
the water, and found new plantations. Beneath the 
very dense growth of the mangroves the scouring 
action of the tides and waves is arrested and a rapid 
deposit of plant and animal remains takes place, so 
that what was sea bottom is soon lifted to the state of 
a fresh-water swamp. As there are numerous vari- 


Land from the Waters 93 

eties of mangroves in the tropical regions, some of 
which, as in Florida, extend their range to> several 
degrees further toward the poles, the area they occupy 
and the land they have won from the sea are alike 
great. There is no basis for a reckoning as to the 
extent of their work, but it is evident tliat in the 
a gg re £ a te these fields must amount to some tens of 
thousand square miles, all of which have been brought 
by these remarkable plants into, the state where the 
engineer may easily complete the work of converting 
them to the uses of man. 

Although the basis for computation is imperfect, it 
may fairly be reckoned that in this debatable ground 
of the shore zone now occupied by mud flats, marshes, 
and mangrove swamps, there is a reserve of land 
awaiting such work of improvement as has been done 
in Holland, amounting to an aggregate area of not less 
than 200,000 square miles of land which with a fully 
peopled earth will be brought into tillage. As this 
land is of rare fertility and enduring to the tax of 
cropping beyond that of any upland fields, it has a 
prospective value as a human asset far beyond an equal 
area of ordinary ground. They are likely, in time, to 
afford the food for several hundred million people. 

Turning now to the areas of the continents which 
are occupied by the fresh waters, as in swamps and 
lakes, we find a more extensive set of fields for recla¬ 
mation than on the sea-shore belt — and a much greater 
variety of problems for the work of the drainage en¬ 
gineer. First we will consider the clearly limited group 


94 Man and the Earth 

of areas which lie along the great rivers, where the 
annual floods render the land untillable. The higher 
parts of these alluvial plains where the annua- mun- 
dations are such as to prevent tillage are easily dealt 
with by ordinary dykeing, and have been thus im¬ 
proved in all the great valleys of long-occupied coun¬ 
tries. Yet there remains along the larger streams of 
Africa, the Americas, and northern Asia aggregating 
several hundred thousand square miles of naturally 
fertile land still unwon to use. A rough reckoning 
of these areas which gives only approximate results, 
indicates that the possible winning in the ultimate 
state of culture will amount to not less than 300,000 
square miles with a tillage value for the. area quite 
as great as that which may be had from the gains 
made on the sea-shores, or the possible subsistence 
of many million. If it should prove possible to till 
the middle and lower reaches of the great rivers 
which flow toward the Arctic Ocean, the Mackenzie in 
North America, and the several streams that traverse 
Siberia, the aggregate area of useful alluvial land 
may be much greater than is indicated by this 
reckoning. 

The true morasses, those inundated fields lying out¬ 
side the alluvial plains, are much more abundant than 
the winnable flooded ground beside the rivers. The 
most common of this group are the bogs formed in 
the lakes which gathered in tli£ shallow pits that were 
shaped by the irregular disposition of the drift left on 
the surface of those areas occupied by the ice in the 


Land from the Waters 95 

last glacial period. When that covering melted away 
these basins so placed as to hold water were almost 
incredibly numerous. Thus, in New England, when 
the earth was cleared of the glaciers, the number of 
them varying in size from areas of an acre to those 
one hundred square miles in extent were to be num¬ 
bered by the tens of thousands. The writer has esti¬ 
mated that not less than ten per cent, of this district 
was thus covered with tarps or lakes. Taking the 
glaciated parts of the world as a whole, the disturb¬ 
ance of the drainage induced by the ice invasion prob¬ 
ably brought about something like this proportion of 
inundated lands where in the earlier times the brooks 
and rivers had in their usual manner provided a com¬ 
plete drainage. 

As soon as the glacial sheet had disappeared and 
the basins held in its debris were filled by water, a 
process of closing them began, a process which has been 
continued to our own day. Along the shores of each 
of those lakes where the waves did not have too much 
power to admit of such growth, a species of moss 
known as sphagnum, the form familiar in almost any 
swamp, found a foothold. The microscopic spores of 
this plant are readily borne by the wind for many 
miles from their parent stations, so that as fast as the 
pools were formed, the growth began, and as the ice 
sheet retreated the mosses were always ready to set 
about their peculiar work. Their task is, indeed, one 
of the most extensive and important of those per¬ 
formed by vegetable life. It is as follows; 


96 Man and the Earth 

Beginning with a delicate mat formed of the inter- 
meshed fronds, the sphagnum mosses quickly form a 
shelf of their living and dead parts which extends out¬ 
wardly from the shore and increases in depth until it 
may be some feet in thickness; next the shore it rests 
upon the bottom, but in deeper water it floats with its 
surface a foot or so above the water. From the lower 
margin of this raft of moss the dead parts of the 
plants fall upon the bottom and by their decay form 
the familiar black, mud or soft peat which often gathers 
to the depth of twenty or thirty feet. Given time — 
and in a geological sense no long period is required 
— and a lake a mile or two in diameter will be closed 
over and solidly filled with the muck deposit. Only 
when the lake is of such area that heavy waves may 
form on it, which serve to break up the advancing mat 
of vegetation, is it preserved from this agent of oblit¬ 
eration. The result is that by far the greater number 
of the glacial lakes formed in New England when the 
ice of the last glacial period disappeared have been 
converted into peat bogs; probably more than nine- 
tenths of them have been thus closed. Further to the 
northward, where the ice went off in more recent 
times, than near its border, the process of occluding 
the glacial lakes is naturally less advanced than in 
New England. In these we more often find “ quaking 
bogs,” i. e., instances in which the sheet has closed 
over the lake, but where the deposit formed on the 
bottom has not been built up to where it supports the 
mat so that the peat-making process is complete. 


Land from the JVaters 97 

The foregoing sketch of the history of peat morasses 
formed in lakes needs to be supplemented by an ac¬ 
count of another method of them development, which 
in many parts of the world where the air is moist and 
cool gives rise to even more extensive deposits — 
those known as upland or climbing bogs. In this 
group the sphagnum begins its growth on the margin 
of any pool and extends its sheet away from the water 
so that it mounts slopes of considerable steepness, 
sometimes ascending to heights of a hundred feet or 
more in an advance of a mile. As it grows in thick¬ 
ness, the lower part of the mat dies and so forms an 
ever-increasing mass of soft peat on which the living 
tangle rests, holding, as in a sponge, the water needed 
for its growth. So effectively does it do this that in 
times of heavy rain the bog swells up and occasionally 
it bursts discharging a tide of black mud which flows 
like a lava stream, in many instances carrying wide¬ 
spread destruction to farms and villages in the valleys 
through which it flows. 

In effect the fields covered by climbing bogs are 
limited to regions north and south of the parallels of 
40° in either hemisphere, for there alone do we find 
the relatively low temperature and the high measure 
of humidity needed for their development. They orig¬ 
inally mantled a considerable part of the land now 
tilled in the northern part of Great Britain, nearly all 
of the lower ground in Ireland, and much of the most 
fertile portion of Germany and Scandinavia, about the 
shores of the North Sea and the Baltic. They still 


7 


Man and the Earth 


98 

exist in vast development in northern Russia and 
Siberia, in Patagonia, and in Canada. South of 
Canada, they are so scantily developed as to have no 
interest from our point of view. In Africa and Aus¬ 
tralia they find no place because of the high tempera¬ 
ture or the dryness of the air, both of which conditions 
prevent the growth of the bog-making mosses. 

It is not easy to estimate the amount of tillable soil 
which can be won from the fields now possessed by 
moss bogs; it may be taken as probable that the aggre¬ 
gate area exceeds 300,000 square miles, it being, per¬ 
haps, the largest part of the earth’s surface which can 
be won from the covering of water. Should it prove 
possible to develop tillage in any considerable part of 
the tundra of Siberia the total may much exceed that 
amount; it may on those conditions rise to near half 
a million square miles. 

As for the quality of the soil obtained/ from these 
peat-covered fields, experience shows that, though vari¬ 
able, it is good for a wide range of uses. The fields 
whence the climbing bogs have been stripped are of 
great and enduring fertility. The level bogs of the 
deposits which have filled lakes have a different char¬ 
acter; they cannot so readily be brought to tillage. 
In fact, it is commonly necessary to strip the mat of 
living sphagnum off and then to cover the surface 
with sand or mix the upper part with ordinary earth. 
Thus treated the ground becomes well suited to a great 
range of important plants, especially those reared in 
market gardens. The interesting industry of cran- 


Land from the Waters 99 

berry growing is one of those forms of tillage in which 
the peat soil is turned to account. In fact this species 
of plant will not commercially develop in any other 
conditions save those of drained swamps. 

One of the largest bodies of unwon yet winnable 
lands is that now covered by the waters of lakes. 
There drainable areas are very numerous, especially 
so in glaciated districts in the part of North America 
recently occupied by the ice-fields. There basins are 
to be reckoned by the tens of thousands, and their 
aggregate area is probably not less than fifteen per 
cent, of the field in which they lie. The greater num¬ 
ber of them, though probably not half of the total 
surface, are to be, in whole or in part, drained and 
brought under tillage as soon as population begins to 
press upon means of subsistence. The ground thus 
made available for tillage is likely in North America 
to amount to not less than twenty thousand square 
miles. 

The quality of the soil to be won by the drainage of 
lakes will in most instances be excellent. These areas 
of water, though in practically all instances of geo¬ 
logically recent origin, have been long enough in exist¬ 
ence to have enriched their bottoms with deposits of 
lime phosphate and other materials favorable to the 
growth of plants. The soils drained from these accu¬ 
mulations will be prevailingly clayey and rather heavy, 
but very little enduring to tillage and of far more than 
average fertility. They may be reckoned on to afford 
fields as well suited to agriculture as the heavy land 


IOO 


Man and the Earth 


of northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where much 
of the surface took on its character below the former 
extension of the neighboring Great Lakes. 

Although the greater number of drainable lakes and 
the largest aggregate area of them lie in the glaciated 
districts, there are many such in parts of the world 
where the ice-sheets have not shaped the surface. 
Other fresh water basins are among the results of 
mountain-building actions which have lowered con¬ 
siderable areas, forming such lakes as the Dead Sea 
of Judea, or the extensive lakes of the upper Nile. 
Many of these basins are so deep, their bottoms often 
lying below the sea level, that complete drainage is 
impossible in many, if not most instances. However, 
the conditions often make it possible to lower the sur¬ 
face of the water to such an extent that large fields of 
good land may be won. 

As a whole, the lake beds may be reckoned on as 
likely to afford, in the ages when the earth is crowded 
with men, a resource in the way of tillable lands in 
area comparable to that which may be had from the 
deserts, the morasses, and the shallow fringes of the 
sea. 


VI 


THE PROBLEM OF THE NILE 

G REAT rivers have always been rich in prob¬ 
lems that concern mankind. Even in the 
savage state they set bounds to his move¬ 
ments as they do to the distribution of all creatures 
without wings. With the advance to the barbarian 
state, and thence to civilization, they constantly be¬ 
came of greater importance. On them the beginnings 
of navigation were made, and their mouths gave access 
to the oceans and created the temptation to seafaring. 
The alluvial plains of the rivers, their most character¬ 
istic feature, afforded the best sites for the develop¬ 
ment of agriculture; there the fields are invariably rich, 
generally continuous, and enduring to the rude tillage of 
primitive folk. The stream gives a path for commerce, 
and the escarpments of the table-lands on either side 
or the islands of its margins afford strongholds that 
are easily defensible against the marauding savages 
with whom the beginners of civilization had always to 
contend. It is clearly in the nature of things that the 
most of the first considerable upward steps in civiliza¬ 
tion should have been made beside the margins of the 
great rivers or on the borders of the greater seas 
where similar opportunities for economic development 


102 


Man and the Earth 

are found. We may note, in the development of the 
Jews, an apparent exception to this rule that men are 
dependent on natural ways for their advance. Their 
seat, though near the sea, was essentially inland, but 
we know that the important cradle-land of the people 
was the Nile valley, and that there and in Mesopotamia 
by large rivers they were to a great extent shaped for 
the part they were to play. , 

To the economic interest of rivers, which has been 
only lessened by the conditions of our modern civiliza¬ 
tion, we have to add that which has come from the 
development of geographic science. We now see that 
water channels of all sizes, but particularly the greater, 
are indices not only of the geologic structures they 
traverse, but of many other phenomena, such as the 
massive tiltings of the continents, the growth of moun¬ 
tain ranges, and the alterations in the level of the 
oceans. They tell us much concerning the ancient 
climates, of the humid and arid periods in former 
geological times. While every considerable river is 
thus rich in features of economic and scientific interest, 
the Nile and its valley are in these regards preeminent. 
It has contributed more to the development of civiliza¬ 
tion than any other, and what it has given and is to 
yield to engineering is of surpassing importance. 

A glance at a world ma,p will show the reader why 
the Nile valley held for several thousand years a pecu¬ 
liarly important place. The north African desert, save 
for occasional oases, limits the agriculture of that 
region to a strip of country near the Mediterranean. 


The Problem of the Nile 103 

This arid district extends to the eastward, including 
the Arabian peninsula and a large part of Asia Minor, 
as far as the valley of the Twin Rivers. Thus around 
the Mediterranean, from the Euxine Sea to the Pillars 
of Hercules, there is no navigable stream and none 
affording any considerable area of tillable land — ex¬ 
cept the Nile. These physical conditions for several 
millenniums protected the developing folk of the Nile 
valley from overwhelming invasion of less advanced 
peoples. Grace to this shelter of the deserts, the 
dwellers of the Nile were able to establish what seems 
to have been the first community that rose above bar¬ 
barism. For about five thousand years, though sub¬ 
jected to repeated attacks, and several times conquered 
by foreign powers, their civilization seems never to 
have been broken up and the people to any great ex¬ 
tent replaced by alien folk, as has been the case in 
other regions. 

The exceptional continuance of the Egyptian people 
is to be accounted for by the singular, indeed, we may 
say the unexampled, conditions of the river which 
makes their land habitable. The Nile gathers all its 
water in the regions of eastern central Africa between 
the northern tropic and the equator. In that elevated 
district the rainfall is heavy and seasonal, the greater 
part of the precipitation occurring in the winter 
time. As the streams which collect it are long and 
pass through several lakes and great morasses, the 
passage of this annual tide to the sea is slow, and the 
discharge is continued for a period of some months, 


104 Man and the Earth 

so that the alluvial plains on either side of the stream 
are subjected to long-continued and very regular 
inundations. 

The passage of the Nile from the region of very 
heavy rainfall to that where the precipitation is so 
slight that there are no permanent streams is sudden, 
the change taking place in a distance of a few score 
miles. The result is that after passing the upper 
cataract the stream enters upon an arid district which 
rapidly becomes a desert as destitute of rain as any 
other equally extensive waste in the world. Thence to 
the sea, for a distance of about two thousand miles, 
it receives no contributions from the regions near its 
path, and but one tributary, the Atbara, a river which 
in the flood season brings a great tide from the moun¬ 
tains of Abyssinia. From the junction of that stream 
to the sea, the Nile has no tributaries save a few tor¬ 
rents, which are filled on those rare occasions, often 
at intervals of years, when a thunderstorm, such as is 
termed by our people a cloud-burst, occurs. In fact, 
from the mouth of the Atbara to the sea, the Nile 
steadily lessens in volume from evaporation. 

The conditions above noted make the Nile in several 
regards the most peculiar river in the world. Other 
streams, such as the Rio Grande and the Colorado of 
North America, gathering the water in rainy districts, 
send their tide across deserts, but this work is not only 
done on a smaller scale, but these rivers occupy narrow 
valleys without extensive alluvial plains, or their flow 
is so slight as to be unimportant to tillage. In the 


The Problem of the Nile 105 

Nile, however, the conditions fit the needs of man as 
nowhere else. Owing to the fact that the land trav¬ 
ersed by the river has in recent geological times been 
much higher above the sea level than at present, its 
stream originally formed a broad canon-shaped gorge 
averaging about ten miles in width; when the land 
sunk or the sea rose to near its present level, the river 
deposits in large part filled in this depression, forming 
the existing alluvial plains and the delta. So that 
when men began their tillage they had at their service 
an area of some thousand square miles of exceed¬ 
ingly fertile land, which was covered in the spring¬ 
time of each year by the extraordinarily regular and 
computable flood-waters. 

Surrounded and protected by the desert which fended 
them from destructive invasions, the first dwellers by 
the Nile had an admirable opportunity to lay the 
foundations of a civilization. The sterile nature of 
the country on either side of the alluvial plain denied 
them all chance of subsistence by hunting or from 
flocks and herds, so they were compelled to give over 
those occupations which have so often held folk back 
on their way upward, and were forced to the better 
work of soil tillers. It seems likely that for a long 
period the agriculture of this field depended for 
its water supply on the annual inundations. The 
ground was delved before the flood came, and the 
sowing done upon the wet surface when it retired; 
hence the parable, “ cast thy bread upon the waters and 
thou shalt find it after many days.” Depending alto- 


io 6 Man and the Earth 

gether upon the water contributed to the soil by the 
single annual flood, there could be but one crop reared 
in fields which were otherwise fitted to afford two or 
three in a year. So it naturally came about that a 
portion of the tilled ground near the main river was 
in time irrigated by means of various contrivances such 
as those now in use, the shedoofs and sakyais that 
border the river. Yet further betterment of tillage 
was accomplished by means of extensive irrigation 
canals and by storing water in reservoirs filled at the 
top of the flood to be used in the long dry season. 
With the needs of a population which appears to have 
been relatively exempted from the evils of war and 
famine, all the tillable land of the Nilotic plains was 
at an early time brought into cultivation much as we 
find it at the present day. 

So far as I have been able to ascertain, the subju¬ 
gation of the Nile valley was about as completely 
accomplished two or three thousand years before Christ 
as it is at the present day. There is probably no other 
equally extensive area in the world where the field of 
tillage has varied so little for a like period. In the 
time of Rameses the Great, the population-sustaining 
power of Egypt was probably about the same as it now 
is. There has been in recent times some increase of 
irrigation in certain districts, but these have in part, 
at least, been balanced by the abandonment of irriga¬ 
tion works in other parts of the country. As a whole, 
however, this land exhibits a singularly ancient adjust¬ 
ment of a people to their environment, one so early 


The Problem of the Nile 107 

accomplished and so well maintained that there has 
been but little change in their customs or numbers for 
at least four millenniums. 

Although in its long history Egypt has come under 
the control of many alien rulers, none of these masters 
down to the time of the last English conquest made 
any serious effort to better the conditions of its peo¬ 
ple by any considerable improvement in the irrigation 
system, or, indeed, in any other way that did not 
promise an immediate gain in their ability to endure 
further burthens of taxation. Upon the advent of the 
modern Englishman with the admirable training given 
him by his experience in India, where he had dealt with 
like problems, there came the beginning of a change 
in many ways the most remarkable that has ever hap¬ 
pened to an unfortunate land. So much of this as 
relates to the administration of justice among people 
who had not known honest, foresightful ruling for 
nigh two hundred generations, does not concern us 
here. Nor can we attend to the very interesting 
political and military steps by which these the first 
merciful conquerors gained their hold upon the coun¬ 
try. It is their task, in part already begun, in ex¬ 
tending the tillage area of this field that concerns us. 

So far the British rule in Egypt has been much 
hampered by the chronic dispute with other European 
powers, especially with France, as to the limit in time 
of this rule and the scope of the control of these new 
masters. Those grave questions have now been effect¬ 
ively disposed of, except that in respect to the claim 


108 Man and the Earth 

of Turkey to suzerainty, and that is a mere political 
ghost. We may, therefore, assume that Egypt is 
henceforth to be even more completely in the hands 
of Great Britain than Hindostan, and this under con¬ 
ditions which permit a much freer exercise of power 
and a more complete execution of great plans for 
betterment than is possible in India. In the Indian 
possessions the work of improvement is hindered by 
the existence of many independent states, by great 
diversities of race and of religion, as well as by the 
number of the people, which amounts to near one- 
sixth of the world’s population. In Egypt the folk 
to be dealt with, in all not more than ten million in 
number, are, as regards those features which have to 
be considered by the government, singularly uniform 
in quality, and in the region below Nubia a most 
obdurately contented and laborious folk. In the equa¬ 
torial provinces, the district about the head-waters of 
the Nile between the northern tropic and the equator, 
where the people have not been subjugated after the 
manner of the fellaheen of Egypt proper, there is 
danger due to the curious recurrences of what may be 
termed the Mahdi madness, arising from the chronic 
expectation, among the Mahomedans, Arabs, and 
negroes alike, of a new prophet who is to lead all 
Islam to conquest. Since the battle of Omdurman 
there have been several pretenders to the title of Mahdi 
who have speedily won followers, but the ease with 
which their movements have been crushed shows pretty 
clearly that there is not much danger of trouble from 


The Problem of the Nile 109 

that source. We may safely assume that with the 
economic development of the tropical section of the 
Nile valley the population will be completely at rest, 
and that the British government will find no hin¬ 
drances in going forward rapidly in the organization 
of work for the development of the whole valley, 
except so much of its head-water districts as belong 
to Abyssinia. 

On the basis of the foregoing all-too-brief account 
of the general conditions of the Nile valley, let us 
proceed to examine into the possibilities of its economic 
development by irrigation under British control. It 
should first be noted that the work already undertaken 
has wisely been directed mainly to extending the 
ancient system of irrigation in such a manner that a 
larger part of the area of Egypt proper, i. e., the region 
below the first cataract, should be watered from canals, 
and thus be able to give two or three crops a year in 
place of the lesser yield derived from the variable 
annual flood. The dam already established below 
Cairo has fairly well provided for the needs of the 
delta region. That at Asyut has been built in order 
to extend the range of the canal service and, inciden¬ 
tally, to better the navigation of the stream. That at 
the First Cataract has the same object, though it will 
store a large amount of water which will help to 
maintain the flow of the river in the season of low 
water, and slightly lessen the flood when it is danger¬ 
ously great. It will also supply canals at a higher 
level than those now attainable. The benefits of these 


no 


Man and the Earth 


improvements will be great; when they are completely 
applied by means of the subsidiary ditches which are 
required, they will add perhaps one-tenth of the crop- 
producing efficiency of the region below Aswan. Other 
like works designed to accomplish the same ends are 
possible within the limits of Egypt proper, and may in 
the end increase the food-giving value of the part of 
the valley below the First Cataract to somewhere near 
twice its present amount, leading to something like a 
doubling of the population, and this within the lifetime 
of the present generation. 

Great as has been the gain to the Nile valley from 
the work of the British engineers since the occupation 
in 1881, it is evidently but the beginning of the work 
they are to do, for when the river and the fields below 
the First Cataract are improved, so far as works below 
that point will better them, there will remain a serious 
imperfection in the system in that a great part of the 
alluvial plain will still be so long submerged that its 
yielding capacity will remain much below what it would 
be if the flood were prevented by a storage of its tide 
in the head-waters. It is evident that the larger future 
of Egypt, a future, indeed, larger than we can foresee 
for any other valley in the world, is to be found in 
the retention of the flood-water of the Nile in the 
region between the tropics, and in the fit distribution 
of it in the arid country along its banks for a distance 
of two thousand miles. 

In some measure the problem of flood storage 
and the utilization of the store, primarily, for irriga- 


111 


The Problem of the Nile 

tion, but, incidentally, as a source of power, concerns 
the most of the great rivers of the world — those 
in the moderately humid as well as those in arid 
countries. But nowhere else is the matter so well 
presented or on such a scale as in the valley of the 
Nile. Here we find a seasonal and irregularly uni¬ 
form flood, which begins to rise at somewhat various 
times in the different head-waters, according to the 
incidence of the rainy season. At Khartum the rise 
of the Nile begins about May 20, and the character¬ 
istic green water of this section of the flood, derived 
from the extensive morasses further up the stream, 
arrives at the First Cataract about June 15, and at Cairo 
about ten days afterward. Upon this flood when it is 
near its height is poured the red muddy water of the 
Blue Nile, which begins to rise in the first week in 
July, and at about the same time the Atbara tide comes 
to top the inundation. The rise of the main river 
continues to about the middle of September. It is 
stationary for about a fortnight and then rises yet 
further, usually to the highest level of the year. Then, 
with fluctuations, it gradually sinks to the winter low 
level, the stream again returning within its banks in 
November. 

The facts show that the continuous flow of the Nile 
is mainly from the branch known as the White Nile, 
which contributes only a small part, probably not one- 
fourth, of the flood-water. This tide comes from the 
Sobat, the Atbara, and the Blue Nile branches. The 
flow at the First Cataract is at the minimum only; 


112 


Man and the Earth 

about 400 cubic metres per second, while at the maxi¬ 
mum it amounts to 10,000 cubic metres per second, 
of which near one-fourth is lost by evaporation before 
it reaches Cairo. These main sources of the flood 
owe their rapid discharge of their contributions to the 
shortness of the rainy season in the basins they drain, 
to the steepness of their grades, and to the limited 
extent of the natural storage places, such as lakes and 
swamps. On the White or Main Nile there are ex¬ 
tensive lakes and morasses which detain the flood-water 
and distribute the discharge over the greater part of 
the year, in place of concentrating it into a period of 
one or two months. We thus see that the problem, 
as briefly stated, which the engineers of Egypt’s future 
have to face, is that of retaining the Nile flood in 
reservoirs and converting it to service in irrigation 
and as a source of mechanical power. 

Before looking more nearly into the problem of 
storage of the Nile flood, let us consider what could 
be done in the way of extending the cultivable area 
of Egypt, provided the whole or even one-half the tide, 
which limits tillage and goes away directly to the sea, 
could be turned to account in watering what is now 
desert and in supplying energy for the arts. First 
let us note that all the arid district from the First 
Cataract to the sea, though it has a somewhat irregu¬ 
lar surface, declines rather uniformly toward the shore, 
and is for the greater part in a position favorable for 
irrigation. Here and there it is intersected by valleys 
formed by rivers in a recent geologic time when the 


The Problem of the Nile 113 

rainfall of this region was sufficient to maintain 
streams. These irregularities, though they would be 
somewhat inconvenient in the development of irriga¬ 
tion, would not prove a bar to such work. They would 
merely require either the lengthening of the water¬ 
ways or the construction of aqueducts. We may as¬ 
sume that canals taken out at the site of the several 
cataracts could be made to deliver water to the most 
of the area lying within twenty miles of the river 
between Berber and the Mediterranean. In the sec¬ 
tion above the First Cataract the irrigable field would 
be narrow and of relatively little value, but below that 
point its average width would be much greater. It is 
impossible to estimate with any approach to accuracy 
the area of this potentially irrigable district, but it is 
several times as great as the existing fertile lands of 
Egypt. A very rude reckoning shows that it is from 
seven to twelve times as great, and for the irrigation 
of this desert realm there is abundant water in the 
Nile flood which now goes profitlessly to the sea. 

As for the fitness of the arid soil of the arid country 
on either side of the Nile for the uses of tillage, there 
can be little or no doubt in the minds of those who 
have seen how, at the touch of water, it at once be¬ 
comes fertile. The so-called sands of the desert, 
though here and there true sands, are very different 
from the similarly appearing material on the sea-shores, 
or in glacial accumulations. They are composed of 
bits of rock of varied mineral composition, which are 
usually much decayed and are extensively mingled 
8 


Man and the Earth 


114 

with organic matter. Everywhere in the Sahara, as 
in other deserts, there is a slight amount of rainfall 
which induces some growth of plants and a limited 
development of animal life, with the result that the 
materials of the soil, even when blown about by the 
wind, are rich in the substances needed for crops and 
yield largely when supplied with water. We see in 
the oases how even a trifling supply may serve the 
needs of palms and corn and afford a rich yield. 

Concerning the engineering work required to retain 
any considerable part of the Nile flood so as to limit 
its long occupation of the fields and to afford water 
for reclaiming desert lands, there lack as yet the sur¬ 
veys which will be necessary for any accurate or even 
approximate determinations; certain points are, how¬ 
ever, clear. The White or Main Nile has, near its 
head-waters, a number of great lakes, the Victoria, the 
Albert, etc. There are also extensive swamps which 
appear to have been originally open basins which have 
been filled with sediments. As before noted, the effect 
of these natural reservoirs is to delay the discharge 
of the flood-water from the western side of the head¬ 
waters, and to distribute the flow more evenly through¬ 
out the year. It would be a matter of no great 
difficulty to extend this process so that nearly the whole 
of the tide from the White Nile could be held back 
until the main river was at its ebb. The Victoria Lake 
has, it is reported, an area of 28,000 square kilometres, 
and it discharges through a narrow gorge at a height 
of about 3,600 feet above the sea. It seems possible in 


The Problem of the Nile 115 

this basin to hold the rainfall of all the area that 
drains toward it a quantity sufficient materially to 
reduce the height of the excessive floods of the stream, 
to reinforce those which promised to be insufficient, 
and in time to irrigate an area far greater than that 
of Egypt as it is now limited. In a less extensive way 
storage is possible in other natural basins of the White 
Nile, probably to an amount that may in the aggregate 
be equal to that of Victoria Lake. It is true, however, 
that the whole amount of the water thus impounded 
during the rainy season would probably not amount 
to more than one-third of that which passes to the sea 
in the time when the main river is in flood. 

The opportunities for the storage of flood-water in 
the eastern tributaries of the Nile, the Sobat, the Blue, 
and the Atbara, are as yet unknown: they are cer¬ 
tainly much less than in the path of the main stream; ; 
yet as lakes are delineated in some of the imperfect 
maps of that region there may be natural opportunities 
for impounding water that will prove of value in the 
development of the irrigation system. It is to be 
noted, however, that even if there be no possibility 
of retaining the flood of this section and distributing 
it throughout the year, the greater part of their value 
could still be utilized. The duration of the flow from 
these rivers is long enough to permit their streams to 
supply water certainly for one crop on the fields they 
are made to irrigate, while by holding back the tide 
of the main Nile until that of its eastern tributaries 
was exhausted, there would be a supply for a second 


116 Man and the Earth 

crop in volume probably nearly equal to that afforded 
by the torrential rains of the Abyssinian highlands. 

Besides the food-producing value that can be won 
from the deserts by the storage and distribution upon 
them of the Nile flood, this waste water has another 
economic feature of much importance. At the point 
where the several branches of the main stream enter 
the alluvial plains- they have a great elevation above 
the sea. At Lake Victoria this height is about 3,700 
feet; at Khartum about 1,300 feet. In general, it 
may be assumed that, with an irrigation system such 
as will within a century or so be developed, the waters 
will pass into canals at such a height that a very large 
amount of power can be obtained from their waters 
before they are brought down to the level when they 
will be turned upon the fields. At the several cataracts 
of the main river, between Asswan and Khartum, 
there is an aggregate fall of over 900 feet; and at 
the First Cataract a minimum flow of 400 cubic metres 
per second, which rises to about 10,000 cubic metres 
at the height of the flood. Even a slight regulation of 
the amount of water in the stream would afford in this 
section of the river a large amount of power. It is 
thus evident that in the systematic development of this 
valley a very great amount of energy available for in¬ 
dustries can be brought into use. 

Thus while the water of the Nile will have to be 
applied primarily to irrigation, there is reason to ex¬ 
pect that it can be made in a considerable measure to 
serve the needs of power. These needs in the Egyp- 


The Problem of the Nile 117 

tian district are already grave. There are no ascer¬ 
tained deposits of.coal or oil in this part of the world, 
and there are good reasons for believing that resources 
of this nature are not likely to be found in any of the 
countries about the Mediterranean. At present all the 
fuel for producing power has to be brought from 
western Europe at a cost which prohibits its use except 
for transportation and in a small way for pumping 
water. It should be possible in time to win from the 
streams a most important contribution to this need. 
The greater part of this power will have to be gener¬ 
ated above the First Cataract and in the present state of 
the art of electrical transmission would not be avail¬ 
able in the lower reaches of the river. But with the 
advance in the systems of conveying this form of 
energy we may expect for it a much wider distribution. 

The large political results which are to develop from 
the British occupation of Egypt become evident when 
they are considered with relation to the irrigation prob¬ 
lem which the Nile affords. There are, of course, cer¬ 
tain advantages of a strategic nature afforded by the 
control of a country which, together with the strong¬ 
hold at Malta, gives the empire mastery of the Suez 
Canal, the main pathway of commerce between the 
Orient and the Occident, as well as of the most con¬ 
venient path between Europe and central Africa. With 
the completion of the railway from Capetown to the 
Mediterranean, Great Britain will have its firm hand 
on those parts of the continent which promise to be 
of value to our race. But the most important results 


118 Man and the Earth 

of this occupation will be found in the development 
of a larger Egypt, which can be made by the use of 
the Nile flood in the irrigation system which is to mani¬ 
fold the area it now waters. At the present time the 
population of Egypt amounts to about 10,000,000, 
supported almost altogether by the tillage of somewhat 
less than that number of acres of land. The improve¬ 
ments in the seasonal distribution of water, such as 
are now in course of development, are likely to in¬ 
crease the population by at least one-half of the present 
total. Although there is lack of data for anything like 
an accurate reckoning in this matter, it appears evi¬ 
dent that with an adequate and possible storage of the 
flood-water of the Nile desert lands in Nubia and 
along the lower reaches of the river can be won to 
cultivation which will afford food for a population at 
least five times as numerous as that now dwelling 
between Khartum and the sea. 

Not the least important feature in this interesting 
situation is the quality of the people in this valley. 
The Fellaheen, who form the principal part of the 
inhabitants of the district from the First Cataract to 
the Mediterranean, are an admirable folk, laborious, 
enduring, fairly intelligent, and with an immemorial 
training in the art of adjusting themselves to their 
overlords. Moreover, they are singularly prolific and, 
with the betterment of sanitation now in rapid prog¬ 
ress, they are certain to increase as rapidly as the 
means of subsistence are enlarged. Experience in the 
campaigns against the Mahdi showed that as soldiers 


The Problem of the Nile 119 

the Fellaheen are, at least when led by European 
officers, well fitted for such military service as is re¬ 
quired in Africa. The negro stocks of the upper valley, 
though perhaps less serviceable material for the uses 
of civilization, are in their way excellent and promise 
to afford a valuable element in the future of the 
country. 

Thus with the development of the part of Africa 
which can be watered by the Nile valley, the British 
empire will come into possession of the power neces¬ 
sary to give it dominance in the African continent. 
The Egyptians appear to be the only folk in that land 
endowed with the qualities required for the task of 
civilizing the tropical parts of its area. At present they 
are debased by millenniums of subjugation, but they 
have retained through it all the qualities which under 
British leadership may solve the African problem. 


VII 

THE MAINTENANCE OF THE SOIL 


F ROM what has been said in the preceding chap¬ 
ters concerning the soil, it is evident that the 
critical point in man’s relations to the earth 
is to be found in that coating of detritus on its way 
from the bed-rocks to the sea. That the relation is 
of the utmost moment is self-evident, for on it abso¬ 
lutely depends all chance of maintaining any consider¬ 
able number of folk even in mere existence. For with 
the soil washed away, or reduced to sterility, the seas 
would be the only source of food, and men would 
become as the fabled icthyopophagi, a rare and scantily 
fed species, dwelling on the shores and subsisting on 
what the waters afforded. 

At first sight, it seems preposterous to suppose that 
the soil beneath our feet is constantly slipping away 
into the sea, yet a very little observation, as before 
noted, shows us that this process is going on every¬ 
where, in tilled and untilled fields alike, but far more 
rapidly in those that know the plough than in those 
which have their natural protective coating of vegeta¬ 
tion. The rate of this motion mainly depends upon 
the inclination of the surface and the extent to which 
it is protected by vegetation; the amount of frost 


Ill 


The Maintenance of the Soil 

action, the rainfall, the occurrence of earthquakes, 
and other minor conditions somewhat affect the move¬ 
ment. In its natural state the average seaward 
movement of the particles composing a large area 
of soil may possibly be as small as a foot in a 
century. From something like that minimum it in¬ 
creases until it becomes so rapid that there is no soil 
coating retained on the surface, as is the condition on 
the areas where the bare rock is exposed. 

In the naturally adjusted surface of the earth the 
decay of the rocks beneath the soil steadfastly and 
effectively provides for the renewal of the coating as 
it passes seaward. This process is going on in all 
regions except the relatively limited areas of the allu¬ 
vial plains where the renewal is accomplished by the 
layer of silt laid down in times of flood. In this re¬ 
newal of the upland soils the process is maintained 
and adjusted as to its rate by the vegetation living 
and dead. The plants act on the bed-rocks in ways 
that tend to disrupt them and to bring the materials 
into the finely divided forms in which they, along with 
decayed organic matter, form a life-sustaining earth. 
Until the soil attains a certain depth, the roots of even 
the lesser plants attain to the bed-rock, their slender 
fibrils enter into its crevices and, expanding there, seem 
to wedge the stone apart. As the coating becomes 
thicker, only the stronger trees reach down to their 
basement, and so this disruptive action becomes less. 
So, too, the decaying vegetation, by forming carbonic 
acid as well as other materials which promote rock 


122 


Man and the Earth 


decay and sending them in solution downward, serves 
to decompose the stony matter. The deeper this work 
goes, the less effective it becomes, so that it too is 
limited in its extension. The result of these checks 
on the process of soil formation is that the layer of 
broken-up rock which only needs to be mingled with 
the waste of plants to form a true soil is commonly 
of no great depth. In regions where the slopes of 
the surface are gentle, and there has been no glacial 
action in modern geological periods to sweep away 
the loose coating, it may amount to a score or so 
feet. Usually, however, it is not more than a yard 
in thickness. 

Although the soil coating is a mere film on the sur¬ 
face of the rock sphere, it is the basis of all its higher 
life; that of the land absolutely depends upon it, for 
without the coating, however thin, there would be 
practically no living beings there. The life of the sea 
also, to a great extent, if not altogether, depends upon 
the materials which are taken into solution by the soil 
water, discharged thence in the springs, and sent by 
way of the river to the deep: there to pass, first, into 
the marine plants, and thence to animals that feed 
thereon. In fact, this layer of waste, which is ever 
slipping away in the streams to the sea, is a kind of 
placenta that enables living beings to feed on the earth. 
In it the substances utterly unfit to nourish plants in 
the state in which they exist in the rocks are brought 
to the soluble shape whence they may be lifted into 
life. All this process depends on the adjustment of the 


The Maintenance of the Soil 123 

rate of rock decay to that of the movement of the re¬ 
newing soil, from the point where it is formed to the 
ocean where it enters once again, as stratified deposits, 
into the crust of the sphere, in time, it may be, to 
tread again the round from rock to soil and thence 
back to sea. 

At first sight it would seem that man’s foremost 
duty by the soil was to stay this endless passing of 
detritus to the sea floors, and that the largest of the 
actions to come from his control of the earth would be 
accomplished by the arrest of this waste. A clearer 
sense of the process shows us that the movement must 
be allowed to continue, yet restrained within fit limits. 
It must go on for the reason that in any mass of broken- 
up rock, such as affords the foundation of the soil, 
more than half is of substances such as quartz that, 
save in small quantity, are useless to plants. Thus if 
the rock be granite the feldspar and mica and the small 
amount of lime phosphate are serviceable, while the 
quartz, which is apt to be in larger quantity, serves, as 
does the nitrogen of the air, as a mere vehicle for the 
really useful materials, the soda, lime, potash, etc. So 
it comes about that where the fields are so flat that the 
movement of the soil to the sea is too slow, the plant¬ 
feeding minerals may all be brought into solution and 
leached away to the streams, leaving the soil encum¬ 
bered by the little-soluble, unprofitable, siliceous waste. 
The true aim, therefore, of a conservative agriculture, 
such as is to maintain the soil in shape to be useful 
to man for an indefinitely long future, is to bring 


Man and the Earth 


124 

about and keep the balance between the processes of 
rock decay and erosion in fitting adjustment. 

Next after the problem of maintaining the soil as 
a structure with all the value it has by virtue of the 
chemical and mechanical conditions of the rocks whence 
it is derived is that of restoring to it the materials 
which are removed by cropping. In the state of nature 
these materials, such as the lime, phosphorus, soda, etc., 
which are taken into the plant when it is growing, are 
restored to the earth when it is dead, so that there is 
little waste of the precious store. But when in our 
agriculture the crops are taken away from the field 
and the soil elements they contain wasted, as in large 
measure they needs must be, the earth is deprived of its 
nutritive quality and inevitably becomes barren. The 
process of sterilizing may be slowed down by the use 
of barnyard manure, but it still goes on; only in very 
fortunate areas does the decay of the bed-rock keep up 
the supply at a sufficient rate to maintain fertility for 
centuries of tillage without resource to rock fertilizers 
imported to the soil. All the seats of ancient agricul¬ 
ture, except the alluvial plains where the annual floods 
bring their contributions of fertilizing silt, show this 
pauperizing effect of long-continued cropping with in¬ 
sufficient restoration of the waste it entails. In such 
areas we find that the used fields have shrunken from 
the hillsides to the lower slopes of the valleys, so that 
in a thousand years, as in many regions about the 
Mediterranean, it is evident that the acreage shared 
by the plough has been reduced, it may be, to half pf 


The Maintenance of the Soil 125 

its best estate by the combined pauperizing influences 
arising from the wasting away and the chemical ex¬ 
haustion of the frail earth. 

In considering what has to be done to keep this very 
sensitive vitalized coating of the soil in shape to do its 
fitting work for man, as well as for the other life of the 
world, it is well to begin with the matters relating to 
the over-rapid passage of the detritus to the sea when 
it is subjected to tillage. In its natural state the soil, 
except in the sterile deserts, is protected in large 
measure from the assault of the rain and winds by the 
coating of living and decayed vegetation which rests 
upon it and serves well as a defence. We readily note 
that on such a vegetated surface the winds, even the 
strongest, lift no dust into the air, while in the Sahara 
even a moderate gale whips up the finer particles of 
the detritus and bears them away, it may be for hun¬ 
dreds of miles, until they fall and are held down on a 
plant-covered area or are given to the sea. Thus from 
the north African deserts there is a constant and vast 
tide of soil material passing to the Atlantic, and from 
the arid region of central Asia the dust clouds pass 
to the humid region of China, there to be laid down 
in accumulations that have attained the thickness of 
thousands of feet and are constantly increasing in 
depth. 

As regards the action of the rain on the surface of 
the soil, the normal coating of vegetation affords a 
shield quite as ‘efficient as it is against the wind. 
Coming on such a surface, the water is held in the mat 


126 


Man and the Earth 


of living and decaying vegetation as in a sponge, 
and is only slowly yielded to the streams. The tor¬ 
rents that form in times of heavy rainfall usually come 
through and over the tangle for the distance of a mile 
or more. Even when the stream brushes aside the 
plant-covering and attacks the soil, it finds the material 
compact and interlaced with roots, so that the destruc¬ 
tive work goes on slowly, and in the intervals between 
the flood seasons the wear is repaired by a new growth 
of vegetation. On the other hand, when the field is 
stripped of the native plant-covering and stirred by the 
plough, both wind and rain have open way to their 
destructive work. For a time, between the overturning 
of the soil and the growth of the planted seed the proc¬ 
ess of erosion is swift. A single gale may strip off 
from the dry surface and bear away more of the soil 
matter than would have been blown away in a geolog¬ 
ical period, and an hour’s torrential rain may wash 
off to the sea more than would pass off in a thousand 
years in the slow process of erosion which the natural 
state of the earth permits. 

Looking closely to this matter of soil wasting under 
the conditions of tillage, we note that the speed of it 
is determined by certain controllable conditions of the 
fields. The action of the wind, the least damaging of 
the two agents of destruction, depends on the dryness 
and roughness of the exposed surface. So long as 
that surface is moist, the air, however swift its motion, 
finds the particles firmly held together by capillary 
attraction; even if it be moderately dry, yet smoothed 


The Maintenance of the Soil 127 

as by a roller, the wind does little effective work. The 
damage done by the rain upon tilled soils is in propor¬ 
tion to the steepness of their slope. When, as in the 
alluvial plains of the great rivers, their slope does not 
exceed two or three feet to the mile, on the alluvial 
plains it is much over-balanced by the contributions 
of sediment laid down by floods, but only a small part 
of the earth’s surface, probably less than the fiftieth 
part of its cultivable area, consists of such flat ever- 
renewing soils. Nearly the whole lies on declivities 
having an inclination of from one to thirty degrees of 
slope. Probably near one-half of the soil areas that can 
be made to yield food for man has a slope exceeding 
one hundred feet to the mile. 

The amount of rain erosion in tilled soils rapidly 
augments with the increase in the slope of the surface. 
While a field with less than 2 0 of declivity may retain 
its soil indefinitely, and many such have endured tillage 
for thousands of years without serious loss in the thick¬ 
ness of the coating, others of like composition lying 
at an angle of 20° will be effectively destroyed in a 
hundred ploughings. It is doubtful if there is such 
a field now fit for cropping which has been tilled for 
a century. It is clear on a mere inspection that in 
countries of considerable rainfall, especially where the 
precipitation is, from time to time, torrential, say to 
the amount of more than an inch in an hour, only 
those areas where the slope is at a less rate than 5 0 
are fit for ordinary agriculture. As a whole, probably 
not more than one-half of the surface of the lands is 


128 Man and the Earth 

in its natural slope and, without very special care, fit 
to be tilled. 

With rare exceptions, the fields of all countries have 
been made to bear their crops without the least refer¬ 
ence to the interests of future generations. Here and 
there in districts where the population has become 
crowded, we find that the steeper slopes have been 
terraced so that the tilled surfaces are made flat; this 
device, however, has been rarely resorted to except in 
the cultivation of the vine. The vineyard on the hill¬ 
side is terraced, not that the soil may be spared for 
the men to be, but that the men who plant it may win 
better wine for themselves. We may search the world 
over in vain for a field which has been cared for with 
reference to the remoter needs of our kind. 

Of all the sinful wastes of man’s inheritance in the 
earth — and all are in this regard sinners — the very 
worst are the people of America. Coming from the 
British Isles, where the rains are rarely torrential and 
where the average declivity of the fields is not great, 
to a realm where land could be had for the asking, 
our folk developed an almost incredible carelessness 
in their tillage. In the New England district and west- 
wardly the glaciated surface, generally covered by a 
thick and porous layer of detritus, was not commonly 
liable to rapid removal of its soils, so that in this region, 
with no thanks to the husbandmen, the damage as yet 
done is relatively small and rarely beyond remedy; 
but south of there, and westward to the arid country 
beyond the Mississippi, the destruction has been vast 


The Maintenance of the Soil 129 

and, over large areas, irremediable. Nearly all the 
fields where the declivity exceeds io° and that have 
been stripped of their natural vegetation are so far 
worn away by the rain that they cannot be restored 
to their pristine fertility. A large part of them has 
passed away from the service of man. In the State 
of Kentucky, which has been occupied by our people 
for less than a hundred and fifty years and has not 
been, to any considerable extent, tilled for more than 
a century, something like a tenth of its tillable area 
has passed through this process of soil destruction, 
and at least a thirtieth part of it cannot be brought 
back to its original fertility in any foreseeable time. 
It must return to the forested state and, in that condi¬ 
tion, through the ages, slowly gather again its mantle 
of soil. 

To prevent the eventual destruction of the upland 
soils and with it the eventual, though remote, reduction 
of mankind to something like a fourth of its present 
numbers, it will be necessary greatly to better our 
methods of tillage with reference to the risks arising 
from erosion. In a word, we shall have to bring the 
average rate of this wasting process down to the con¬ 
ditions of nature in all the areas which have been won 
to the plough, and to maintain it on that ratio in the 
lands hereafter subjugated. We may expect, indeed, 
to reduce it below the pristine rate in many regions 
of steep slopes — those at too high an inclination to 
amass soils except by some benching process. Much 
work has been done on a small scale, it is true, yet 
9 


Man and the Earth 


130 

effectively, in all the vine-growing districts of Europe 
and elsewhere, where, on slopes so precipitous that 
even the wild plants could not arrest the washing away 
of the decayed rock, benches serve to retain a profitable 
soil. 

The first step, leading from our present age of neg¬ 
lect to that in which the soil is to be adequately — we 
may say religiously — conserved, will be by a classifi¬ 
cation of fields into those in which the decay of the 
bed-rock or other agencies maintains the mass in its 
best estate, and those wherein the inevitable loss is not 
so made good. So far no such classification has been 
essayed. Accurately to make it would require very 
careful and extended observations, yet in a rough, but 
sufficiently complete, manner it can be done by mere 
eye inspection by any one who is familiar with the 
symptoms of erosion. Wherever a field shows a trace 
of rain-storm gullying by temporary streams we know 
that the process of destruction is very rapid. Even 
where this evidence is wanting, but the brooks have 
muddy water that makes a deposit in the places where 
it does not move swiftly, we may know that the rate 
of soil removal in the region it drains is injuriously 
high. When a great river, such as the Mississippi, 
bears a tide of exceedingly muddy water to the sea, 
we may be sure that a large part of its valley is sub¬ 
jected to destructive soil erosion. Thus, within a nar¬ 
row margin of error, it will be an easy matter to 
group the fields into say three classes, i. e., those that 
need no care to prevent waste; those where precau- 


The Maintenance of the Soil 131 

tions as to the methods of tillage may restrict waste 
within the limits of safety; and those where speedy 
destruction is inevitable without such precautions as 
benching where they are to be tilled, or the maintenance 
of grass or forest covering. On the basis of such a 
classification there needs to be a rigorous legal control 
of our exploitation of the soil. It is idle — nay it is 
criminal — to sacrifice the bread of man to notions 
of individual rights in the earth. Granting all the 
most extreme individualist can claim, the right of man¬ 
kind to the conditions that make its life possible must 
brush aside the ignorances and negligences of the mo¬ 
mentary tenant. Until this judgment is expressed in 
adequate action man will not begin to do his duty by 
his inheritance. 

The fertility of the soil, because it is a matter of 
immediate profit or loss, has always been of much 
interest. Even our American Indians, rude as was 
their agriculture, are said to have known that by 
burying fish in their cornfields they could increase the 
yield of grain. Among all peoples who make much 
use of agriculture there appears to be some knowledge 
as to the value of barnyard manure. The use of this 
material may be taken as indicating the second stage 
in the art of soil tilling. The third stage of the art — 
that in which resort is had to the mineral stores of the 
earth for the maintenance of the fertility of the soil 
— appears to be essentially modern and to have origi¬ 
nated in northern Europe, probably in England, the 
first step being taken in the process, some centuries 


Man and the Earth 


132 

old, of covering impoverished soils with burnt lime¬ 
stone. It is to' the development to this last stage in the 
management of the soil that we have to look for the 
prevention of the exhaustion which cropping under 
any other conditions of management inevitably entails. 

The principle on which rests the plan of refreshing 
the soil by the use of mineral fertilizers is simple. 
We see that all the earth matter removed by cropping 
has been derived from the decay of the rocks whence 
the body of the soil has been derived. Only the nitro¬ 
genous and carbonaceous materials have come from 
the air by the action of the plant and animal life it 
bears; these are to be had in any amount through the 
mediation of its living tenants. Therefore to replace 
the waste we have but to find those rocks which abound 
in the needed fertilizing materials, treat them in a way 
that will bring the useful elements they contain into 
a state where the roots can do their work, and apply 
the stuff to the fields. While all this is plain enough 
in the light of recent experience with commercial ferti¬ 
lizers, it escaped public attention until within the last 
half-century, when a curious series of commercial ac¬ 
cidents and iniquities made the matter plain. The 
story of it need be briefly told, for it shows the way 
to the new agriculture — that which promises an in¬ 
definite duration of the service which soil-film renders 
to man. 

Very long ago the Indians on the west coast of 
South America, a people who had attained to the first 
stages of civilization, learned to use what they termed 


The Maintenance of the Soil 133 

guano , i. e., the organic waste from the nesting places 
of the sea-birds, for fertilizing their well-tilled fields. 
They knew the value of this substance when the country 
was conquered by the Spaniards nearly four hundred 
years ago. Toward the middle of the last century this 
guano began to be imported into Europe, where its 
value as a manure was quickly appreciated. In a short 
time the demand for the material outran the supply, 
so that what was imported was mixed with various 
substances, ground bones, waste fish, etc. At this stage 
the rapidly developing knowledge as to the chemical 
nature of rocks made it plain that the lime phos¬ 
phate, the most important element in the guano, could 
be had as well from certain mineral deposits as from 
the waste of slaughter-houses and the burial-places of 
old battle-fields. So it came about that the rock phos¬ 
phates were used in adulterating the guano brought from 
the bird rookeries, or complete imitations were made, 
still bearing the original name. This stage was quickly 
passed and the superphosphatics, i. e., crushed phos- 
phatic rock treated with sulphuric acid to make it 
soluble, replaced guano in the market. In the form of 
“ fertilizers ” it usually contains ammonia, to furnish 
nitrogen, and potash as well as lime phosphate, but the 
latter is the most important constituent. 

So rapidly has this use of artificial, essentially rock, 
manures advanced that it may fairly be reckoned as 
the most significant and important of the great win¬ 
nings of the last half-century. All the other improve¬ 
ments in the arts but add to our range of action or 


134 


Man and the Earth 


increase the comfort of life; this insures the permanence 
of civilization'when else its end was to be reckoned on 
in a historically brief time. To see the full possibilities 
that the use of geological fertilizers opens to us we need 
only note in a general way the manner in which these 
deposits have been produced, and the amount of their 
accessible stores. This may be briefly done as follows: 

Every plant in growing takes from the water of the 
sea or the like water of the soil a share of the dissolved 
mineral substances, brings them into organic shape, 
and, at its death, leaves them thus fit for life in soil 
or sea. On the sea floor the strata are partly built of 
this organic waste, so when they are elevated into the 
emerged lands and brought to decay the soil becomes 
fertile in proportion to the remains of life that entered 
into it. Where the rock is a pure sandstone the result¬ 
ing soil will contain an excess of quartz and possibly 
be unfit for tillage; when it is a limestone, made up 
as these rocks are of animal remains, it is certain to be 
fertile. Where it is derived from the so-called igneous 
or plutonic rocks, such as traps or granites, it is likely 
to be fairly rich in lime phosphate, soda, and potash, 
for the minerals of these rocks commonly yield a 
goodly store of these substances needed by the grain¬ 
bearing plants. 

The animals most engaged in rock building differ 
much in the amount of plant food they contribute to 
the sediments they form. Thus the corals and mol- 
lusca deposit lime carbonate, and the rocks altogether 
composed of their remains are not rich in phosphorus; 


The Maintenance of the Soil 135 

but all the crustaceans and certain bivalve shells of the 
lingula kindred have their hard parts formed largely 
of lime phosphate and the soils composed of debris 
from them are always rich in this most important sub¬ 
stance for the production of grains. Thus the Silurian 
limestones in central Kentucky, which are so enduring 
to ill treatment that for a hundred years of misuse they 
have brought good crops of Indian corn and wheat, 
owe their continued fertility to the existence in the 
strata of layers containing often as much as twenty 
per cent, of lime phosphate, which is continually coming 
into soluble condition and so replaces the waste. 

The extent of the deposits containing a sufficient 
share of lime phosphate to provide for the refreshment 
of our grain fields is not yet definitely computable. 
The demand for such materials is so recent, having been 
active for less than half a century, that only a small 
part of the world has, as yet, been searched for them. 
The subject is of such surprising interest that a brief 
summary as to the modes of occurrence of lime phos¬ 
phate may well be given. The conditions are in general 
as follows: 

First to be noted are the deposits of crystallized lime 
phosphate known as apatite, a hard, greenish mineral 
commonly found somewhat plentifully in veins occur¬ 
ring in granitic rocks. This is one of the richest forms 
of the substance, but, though at one time considerably 
used, has been replaced by the lower-grade but more 
cheaply won materials from the stratified rocks. These 
occur in a great variety of conditions in all of which 


Man and the Earth 


13 6 

the deposits have been concentrated from an originally 
more diffused state in the strata. Sometimes, and im¬ 
portantly, the accumulation is in the form of a bed 
just below the soil on top of the bed-rock, represent¬ 
ing the waste left in the leaching away of the strata 
which have disappeared from the area. This accumu¬ 
lation has been brought about by the action of the 
downward percolating waters which, in passing through 
the soil, become charged with carbonic acid gas; thence, 
passing into beds containing lime phosphate, they take 
that substance into solution and bear it on downward 
until they come to a deposit of lime carbonate, then 
they lay down the phosphate, because the carbonate 
of lime is more soluble; the released lime phosphate 
gathers into a sheet or, more commonly, into nodules 
of the substance. There are other ways in which 
this concentration may be affected, but that just above 
set forth is the commonest in occurrence. 

The amount of these concentrated phosphates formed 
in the manner above noted is great; those of South 
Carolina, Georgia, and Florida have come into very 
extensive use in this country, vastly bettering the pro¬ 
duction of cotton and other crops. Like deposits are 
constantly being discovered in other lands. It is prob¬ 
able, however, that these concentrations will be effect¬ 
ively exhausted in a few centuries to come, so that 
resort will necessarily be had to the beds of rock much 
less rich in the precious material of these accumula¬ 
tions. The quantity of these is so great that they may 
be judged adequate for all the demand that we can 


The Maintenance of the Soil 137 

conjecture for all the ages that we can conceive of 
man’s tenancy of the planet. 

As regards the other needs for the refreshment of 
the soil, especially the potash and soda, the sources of 
supply seem fairly adequate for an indefinite future. 
They are contained in various, but often large, quan¬ 
tities in the feldspars, the micas, in salt, and other 
common minerals. From these substances they can be 
won, though it may be in the case of potash at more 
expense than is now required for their production. 
There seems, however, no reason to apprehend that 
if we keep our soils from an over-hasty going to the 
sea, the generations to come will ever have occasion 
to blame us for the lack of their stores we have wasted 
in our careless neglect of their rights. Therefore we 
return, for a final word, to the danger arising from 
excessive erosion as the principal menace to the value 
of the earth as the dwelling-place of the higher life 
— that of man. 

In the manner that soil-tilling men have ever dealt 
with the earth — as we for all our enlightenment are 
now dealing with it — the processes of tillage every¬ 
where and in terms of centuries mean a progressive pau¬ 
perizing of its vitalized part, the soil. So far as this 
degradation is due to a lessening of the chemical stores 
needed by plants, rehabilitation is possible, though at 
much cost, by resort to the mineral manures. So far 
as it brings about a lessening of the mass of the soil, 
except where the underlying rock is breakable by the 
plough — a seldom condition — the damage cannot be 


138 Man and the Earth 

remedied save at the impossible cost of importing soil 
from other fields. Recognizing then that the main aim 
of those who would save for the earth should be the 
preservation of the film that maintains the higher life, 
the question comes as to how this task can be effected. 

This question as to the method of controlling the 
administration of the soil and other earthly resources 
is to be considered in the last chapter of this book, 
but in order to avoid leaving in the air the matter we 
are considering, it may be said that the only way in 
which the need can be met is by enforcing through 
laws the principle, clearly enough recognized in our 
codes, that the wealth a man controls is his to use but 
not his to waste. A man may not burn down his house 
or play the spendthrift with his fortune, because the 
state or his natural heirs will suffer from his folly or 
his malevolence. On the same ground the common¬ 
wealth-law should arrest his action if it wastes the 
substance of the unborn. It is an old and well-affirmed 
concept, though too little worked out, that our govern¬ 
ments exist in part that they may guard and preserve 
the societies that build them. If such is their purpose, 
their first duty should be to see that the material foun¬ 
dations of mankind are not idly wrecked. 


VIII 

THE RESOURCES OF THE SEA 


S O far in our consideration of the resources of 
the earth that have value to man, we have reck¬ 
oned on those stores alone which the land 
affords. We have regarded the oceanic field as having 
no great value as a source of the materials needed for 
his subsistence. Judged by the conditions of to-day, 
we might well dismiss the resources in the way of food 
afforded by the wildernesses of the sea as we have 
those from the wild places of the land. They are in¬ 
teresting, but worth no more than a passing remark. 
But while the waters of the sea contribute at present 
probably not more than two or three per cent, of the 
food of man and but little else of prime importance 
to his immediate needs, there is reason to expect that 
in the future they may yield largely to his necessities 
through arts as yet in their beginning, but capable of 
indefinite extension. 

To forecast the food-giving value of the sea in the 
time when the earth has been brought under the effect¬ 
ive control of man, we have to note certain of its 
general conditions which bear upon the problem. First 
of these is the fact that the sea-waters are the great 
repository of the mineral materials which have been 


140 Man and the Earth 

leached out of the rocks and soil to find their way to 
the deep through the streams. To this store is added 
the commonly very soluble rocks thrown from vol¬ 
canoes in the form of ash and pumice and falling 
directly upon the waters. From these sources of supply 
the oceans receive each year several cubic miles of 
varied substances which are, or quickly become, dis¬ 
solved in its waters. We know them in a gross way 
in the bitter saline taste — the saltness of the sea. 
Analysis tells us that in each cubic millimetre of the 
fluid there is probably a share of all the elements that 
enter into the earth and very many of their compounds. 

Owing to the ample variety of materials in the sea¬ 
water and to the considerable amount of these solids 
which it contains, it serves the plants it feeds as the 
soil-water serves those of the land. These marine 
plants draw their nourishment from it just as the land 
plants do, only they take it not through roots but 
through the general surface of their bodies. Some of 
the multitudinous species of marine vegetation are 
fastened to the bottom, others, in great variety, float 
in the water, drifting in its currents. In amount this 
vegetable matter of the seas is probably equal to the 
plant growth of the land, though it is less varied in 
species and nowhere accumulated in forest-like masses. 
It is true that one of the sea-weeds of the northern 
Pacific Ocean is said to have a stem much longer than 
any tree is high, but for all that the marine plants 
are characteristically of lowly growth, as they are lowly 
in structure. Their real importance comes from the 


The Resources of the Sea 141 

fact that they serve, as all plants do, as a medium of 
communication between the mineral realm and the 
animal. As is well known, animals cannot go directly 
to inorganic substances for their supply of food, but 
have to take it by the intermediation of plants which 
alone have the power of appropriating from the min¬ 
eral kingdom. 

Although the rate of growth of marine plants is 
probably slower than that of land species, yet because 
of the fact that the seas have about thrice the area 
of the lands and a large part of their life floats in the 
water, the aggregate production of vegetable matter 
is probably greater than that formed in the air. More¬ 
over, practically all of this marine vegetation is at the 
service of animal life, while only a relatively small part 
of that developed above the sea level is accessible to 
animals. The result is that seas provide through these 
plants a store of nutriment such as the radiates, mol¬ 
luscs, articulates, and vertebrates require in quantity 
very much greater than that accessible to the animals 
of the land. The effect of this is seen in the vast 
amount of this life that feeds on marine vegetation 
or on the creatures that subsist thereon. Though there 
is no basis for computations, there is little doubt that 
in total bulk the oceanic animals very much exceed 
those of the continents, even in their primal wilderness 
state. 

The foregoing considerations which, though very 
limited, may suffice to give the reader some notion of 
the body of marine life, at once suggest to him that 


I 4 2 


Man and the Earth 


there are vast potentialities in the way of food to be 
derived from the oceans, provided it ever becomes 
possible to turn the store to the uses of man. The 
range of these possibilities cannot as yet clearly be 
foretold, but that they are very large will be evident 
on a nearer view of the conditions which we will now 
seek. 

At present, men the world about look to the life of 
the marine realm for a limited part of their food and 
a yet more limited share of materials useful in the 
arts — whalebone, oil, and the ivory from whales’ 
teeth, shells for carving, pearls for ornament, fishes 
and sea-weed for manure, etc. It is evident that it is 
the fishes and molluscs and crustaceans that are in the 
future, as at present, to have noteworthy value. The 
sea-weeds may come to importance as a source of 
potash, soda, etc., provided resort is had to the floating 
sargassum or gulf-weed that so abounds in certain 
parts of the oceans. It may be found possible to 
gather this material by vessels constructed for the 
purpose, squeeze the water from it, and bring it ashore 
for the value there is in the ash of the plants. So 
too in time it may be found advantageous to collect 
the mud from certain parts of the shallows, using the 
material as manure. Still, the only large opportunity 
the seas afford is in the way of food. 

It is to be noted that we now win from the sea, 
as primitive hunters won from the wildernesses, only 
a very small part of the food supply which those fields 
yield. As regards our access to the food nurtured in 


The Resources of the Sea 143 

these wilds, we are worse off than the lowest savage 
in the woods with his spear or throwing stick. In that 
stage of human advance the most productive forest 
supplied so little that several square miles of it were 
needed to support a man. Brought to high tillage the 
area might be able to feed him from the products of 
an acre of its ground. The question therefore arises 
as to how far it is possible for the process of subjuga¬ 
tion, such as man subjects the dry land to, to be ex¬ 
tended over the watery realm. The answer is evident 
— not very far. We cannot till the sea floor; we 
cannot hope to replace the marine vegetation with 
plants more serviceable to man. The gain that may 
be won will have to be made on other lines of advance, 
so far as we can see, in the ways set forth below. 

The most evident way to increase the amount of 
food derivable from the sea is that already entered on 
by the experiments in propagating marine fishes, which 
are conducted by our federal government. These ex¬ 
periments rest for their chance of success on the well- 
known fact that by far the greater part of the young 
produced by any of our food fishes perish before they 
attain maturity. Thus in the case of our common 
mackerel, the female lays some fifty thousand eggs, 
and of these, on the average, not more than two come 
in turn to reproduce. Moreover, the greater part of 
the loss occurs while the young are so small as to be 
sluggish and unable to escape their enemies. By hatch¬ 
ing the eggs of this and other species artificially and 
maintaining the creatures until they can shift for them- 


i 4 4 


Man and the Earth 

selves, it is fairly expected that, in place of one in 
twenty-five thousand, .one in a dozen may live to be 
adult. So far, the trials of this project have been 
made mainly with the anadromov^ fishes, i. e., those 
like the shad and the salmon that run up the fresh¬ 
water streams to lay their eggs. The results have been 
amply successful, showing that the theory of fish 
growth and the accidents to which the young are 
liable is true. It has not been commercially successful 
with the other groups, such as the cod, haddock, etc., 
probably for the reason that these purely marine species 
are more given to wandering far from their birth¬ 
place, so that they are not so much exposed to capture 
by fishermen. There is no evident reason why we 
should question its success with them provided the 
breeding were extensive enough to stock the seas with 
the young which had been protected — not the wide 
oceans but the rather limited fields which a particular 
species is wont to inhabit. While the matter must be 
regarded as one for the future rather than for the 
present, there is no reason why man’s care of the sea 
fishes that suit his needs should not become as effective 
as that of an English gamekeeper who cares for his 
stock of pheasants. 

With the molluscs and crustaceans the hand of man 
finds much easier subjects for partial domestication 
than the true fishes. These creatures are less migra¬ 
tory, and lend themselves to processes of rearing and 
feeding. This art, already well developed in the oyster 
industry, can be extended to many species of molluscs 


i 


The Resources of the Sea 145 

fit for food and, probably, to lobsters and their kindred 
as well. By artificial hatching and the proper use of 
enclosed embayments of the sea, there is no doubt 
that the amount oi’food derived from its waters could 
be greatly extended. 

There is a field of experiment not yet essayed, in the 
matter of marine animals, which deserves considera¬ 
tion. This is as to the possibility of developing vari¬ 
eties and even species specially fitted for the needs of 
man. Among the fishes, at least, we know that we 
have forms that can be readily changed by the breeder’s 
art. It seems altogether likely that, in the time to 
come, we shall have many products of this art intro¬ 
duced into our fresh waters and into the sea under 
conditions which will give them dominance over the 
existing forms. This is evidently possible with those 
species which include the greater number of the so- 
called food fishes that have the habit of dwelling in 
the shallow waters near the shores, and when they 
make seasonal journeys usually seek to return to the 
fields they have temporarily left. 

It is probably not yet the time to undertake any 
extensive experiments in hybridizing or otherwise im¬ 
proving our marine food-giving species of animals. 
Such undertakings probably better await the further 
development of our knowledge of heredity — of that 
vast complex of actions which modern science is ex¬ 
ploring. Moreover, the need of sources of food is not 
yet what it is to be in the time to come. Here and 
there, as yet but locally, population is pressing on the 


10 


Man and the Earth 


146 

means of subsistence, but until the tillable lands are 
subjugated, it will not be worth while to undertake 
those vast essays necessary to develop the latent re¬ 
sources of the oceans. There is, however, evident use 
for an international work in the study of marine life 
from the point of view of its general economic impor¬ 
tance. We have already excellent government commis¬ 
sions for the study of local fishery problems, but, so 
far as the matter relates to marine animals and plants, 
there is need of a board which shall deal with the 
matter in a far wider manner than any bureau can. 
At a trifling international cost, say that required for 
the maintenance of a small squadron of modern war¬ 
ships, we could have a study made of all the food 
animals of the oceans as well as extended experiments 
in naturalizing useful species on shores where they do 
not now exist. There are good reasons for believing 
that in this manner a large and immediate profit would 
be won. At the same time the way would be prepared 
for the greater task of domesticating so much of marine 
life as would lend itself to the service of man. 

There is yet another interesting field for experiment 
with marine life which, if properly essayed, may pos¬ 
sibly lead to the development of an important addition 
to the resources afforded by the sea. This consists in 
the domestication of certain species of seals. As is 
well known, among the many forms of these carniv¬ 
ora there are a few which readily lend themselves 
to domestication. The common seal, the Phoca vitu~ 
lina, of the north Atlantic coasts, is perhaps the most 


The Resources of the Sea 147 

tamable of any of the wild carnivora. Made captive 
when young and reared by hand, it accepts man as a 
master quite as does the dog. It seems not unlikely 
that, if protected from hunters, certain species of these 
seals, including those whose skins are valuable, could 
be bred in captivity and by selection and colonizing 
not only made to yield more valuable pelts, but brought 
to inhabit the shores of many districts where they are 
now unknown. 

The fact that the seals are prevailingly wide-ranging 
in their habits, journeying for great distances in search 
of their food, which consists mainly, if not altogether, 
of fishes, need be no hindrance to their partial domesti¬ 
cation, for they have the habit of returning to their 
wonted breeding-places at a certain time of the year. 

It is probable that the seals are the only marine 
mammals which are likely to be available for experi¬ 
ments in domestication, for they alone have the habit 
of resorting to the shore. The other marine mammals, 
the manitee, porpoises, whales, etc., seem to be quite 
beyond the possibilities of human control; but in this 
group of the seals there is evidently an admirable field 
of experiment, one that deserves immediate attention, 
for the reason that the most interesting and promis¬ 
ing species are approaching extinction from the murder 
that is done upon them. 

The sea-birds offer an interesting field for experi¬ 
ment in domestication and improvement. The flesh 
and eggs of many species have value as food and the 
feathers of certain of the ducks, as the eiders, are ser- 


Man and the Earth 


148 

viceable. In a condition of affairs when the hunter 
has ceased to be, it should be easy to develop rookeries 
on many a hundred miles of shore where desolation 
now abides. The birds of these marine species, such 
as the sea-pigeons and the eider ducks, gather their 
food over wide ranges and find it in marine species 
which are of no service to man. They do not interfere 
with the fishes that serve for his sustenance, so that 
any increase in their species would in no wise lessen 
the value of the existing fisheries. Nearly all the rock 
shores of high latitudes about the North Atlantic appear 
to be here and there well suited to the needs of these 
sea-fowl. Wherever there are cliffs and isles so iso¬ 
lated that the foxes and other predatory mammals 
cannot have access to the nests of these birds, one or 
another species will flourish. In the primitive con¬ 
ditions of this region, these shores were amazingly 
rich in avian life, but man, like his kindred the mon¬ 
keys, is by nature a nest robber, and the devastation 
he has wrought is nearly complete. 

It is not yet known how far the marine birds are 
improvable by the processes of breeding. It is, how¬ 
ever, to be noted that every one of the social species 
which man has adopted have proved to be readily 
domesticable and lend themselves to the breeder’s art. 
In fact, the class of birds, as a whole, is by far the 
most pliable of any in the animal kingdom. In size, 
quality of flesh, plumage, and the features of mind 
that make domestication practicable, the birds are sin¬ 
gularly well fitted to be the servants of man. There 


The Resources of the Sea 149 

is no reason to believe that, among the numerous 
species which have the habit of feeding at sea, there 
will not be found certain kinds which, with our ever- 
advancing knowledge of heredity, can be brought to 
lend us profit from their lives. 

Thus while the oceanic realm is, and is likely ever 
to remain, an unsubjugable wilderness, there is fair 
basis for hope that, in time, its life may be made to 
contribute far more than it now does to the needs of 
man. In its depths the absence of light, and the con¬ 
sequent scantiness of life, make it essentially a desert. 
So, too, in the regions far from the shores, the life is 
commonly small in amount and consists mostly of the 
lower forms. But in the shallower water, near the 
shores, are the fields to which we may look for help 
in the ages when the world is to be taxed to meet the 
needs of our kind. 


IX 


THE CHANGES TO COME IN THE 
HUMAN PERIOD 

I N looking forward to a geologically long sojourn 
of man upon this planet, the question arises as 
to the changes beyond his control that may affect 
his station for better or for worse. What are we to 
expect from within and from without; what alterations 
in his body and mind or in the conditions in the realm 
in which he dwells ? The field is large as the seas and 
lands, and in exploring it*we have little guidance, yet 
there are certain leading facts which make the effort 
worth our while. 

It may at the outset be said that the span of human 
records, of any clear nature, taken at its greatest com¬ 
putable length of say eight or ten thousand years, is 
too brief to serve us as a scale. Looking forward for 
a like period we may be sure that no considerable 
change in man or in his environment is likely to come 
about; ten millenniums, measured in terms of human 
life, is a great time, but in those of the organic or 
physical history of the earth it is but a day. It is 
only as we look forward to man’s fate, in some such 
period as half a million years in the future, that we 
may begin to reckon on alterations in himself and his 
surroundings that may radically affect his life on this 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 151 

earth. Taking this far view, what, then, does our 
knowledge afford us for guidance in our conjectures? 

Knowing as we do that it is the nature of organic 
forms to undergo changes in the geologic ages, the 
most immediate question is as to the permanence of 
the human body; we would like to know whether our 
successors who are to inherit this realm are to be 
shaped like ourselves, or, if their form is to alter, in 
what directions the modifications are to trend. On this 
matter there is much light to be had from what we 
know as to the history of our kind in its long, slow 
passage from its station in the lower mammals to its 
present estate. This is no place for a discussion of 
the large mass of evidence that needs be adduced in 
a scientific presentation of the problem; we must limit 
ourselves to a few simple statements setting forth 
facts so well known to biologists that they may be 
deemed unquestionable, and to the legitimate infer¬ 
ences to be made from them. 

An inspection of the facts gathered from the geo¬ 
logical record and from the living species of mammalia 
shows us that the body we inherit was, so far as its 
most essential features are concerned, determined on 
at the beginning of the mammalian series. The limbs, 
muscles, organs, character of skin, and the relations 
of the several parts were in existence in the first of 
the suck-giving vertebrates, certainly as far back as 
the Triassic, and, probably, in the Carboniferous period. 
No computations of geologic time make this beginning 
less than ten million years ago: it is probably more 


i$cl Man and the Earth 

than ten times as remote from the present day. So 
far as we can see, there has been but one physiological 
change marked by the development of a new structure 
in this series leading to man. This consisted in the 
invention of the placenta, a functionally important 
modification which has not changed the general shape 
or quality of the body. 

Beginning with all its structural elements deter¬ 
mined, the placental mammal has effected its advance 
without any innovations in the way of bodily parts, 
and altogether by minor alterations in the number, 
shape, and proportions of the apparently unchange¬ 
able plan to which it has adhered. In the lower part 
of the human genealogical tree among the mammals 
in general, up to the time when our ape-like ancestors 
were shaped, the body was more plastic than in its 
upper portion when it began to take on the man-like 
aspect. Since the beginning of the anthropoids, or 
human-like forms not yet of man’s estate, the changes 
have been but slight and altogether in the proportionate 
length of limbs, size of brain, etc. It is evident that, 
due to some cause that we have not as yet ascertained, 
the series of animals that led from the marsupials to 
men is the most unchangeable of any known to us in 
the type of vertebrates, but that this rigidity of the 
body has been progressive is shown by the fact that 
the genus homo , though the most widely distributed 
over the lands of any vertebrate, and meeting a singu¬ 
larly varied environment, has its several species very 
closely related to one another, the differences being 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 153 

far slighter than we are accustomed to find them among 
forms having such a wide range. 

There are a number of organic series which have 
attained something like the fixity of structure which 
we find in man. Certain groups of fishes, reptiles, and 
batrachians among the lower vertebrates show the same 
feature of stability. This quality is found also among 
the molluscs and articulates; it would not be difficult 
to gather a list of half a hundred instances of persist¬ 
ency in anatomical structure essentially like that of 
man. Whenever once fixed the form does not again 
become variable; it abides in its rigidity until it ceases 
to be. Furthermore, the fact that a group has be¬ 
come invariable appears in some ways to insure it 
great longevity. This is in certain instances perhaps 
because the particular adjustment is well contrived to 
meet the ills that come from within and from without, 
and so the shape endures; but more commonly it 
appears to depend upon a certain fixity in the form 
itself which prevents it from altering, however great 
the need of change, in order to adapt the structure to 
the conditions of environment even though they be 
greatly changed. A good example of this is found in 
the crayfishes that have retained essentially unaltered 
the lobster shape since when, in the Carboniferous 
period, they separated from that marine group to be¬ 
come the tenants of the fresh-water streams. In their 
new station their habits of life are utterly different 
from that of their ancestors in the sea. They have 
been forced to make very radical changes in the stages 


Man and the Earth 


*54 

of metamorphoses through which their young pass on 
the way from the egg to the full-grown form. They 
have been led to construct extensive and complicated 
systems of subterranean ways, totally unlike anything 
done by marine crustaceans, yet the adult form has 
undergone no important alteration since it dwelt in 
the sea mayhap fifty million years ago. 

In man we evidently have a genus that is in some 
way, so far as the body is concerned, essentially im¬ 
mobile. This incapacity for adjusting itself to changes 
of environment is not a novel feature in the genus: 
it is characteristic of the series to which it belongs, 
and has been more and more affirmed with the advances 
toward the human station. Therefore, unless man 
should in some as yet inconceivable way gain control 
of those conditions of inheritance which determine the 
shape of his body, he will bide substantially as he is 
to the end of his history. It is in the highest degree 
improbable that the advancement of learning will ever 
give him mastery over the shape of his kind. So far 
as we can see, the conditions determining that shape 
are as inevitable as those ruling the order of the solar 
system, and as little within our control. 

Though, so far as we can fairly conjecture, mankind 
of the last generation on earth are to be structurally 
the same as those of the first, there is good reason to 
believe that important changes of proportion are likely, 
we may say certainly, to occur. We base this opinion 
on the fact that they have recently come about among 
men. The several species and varieties of men which 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 155 

have developed are the product of conditions peculiar 
to particular fields, probably within less than one hun¬ 
dred thousand years. The difference between these 
stocks is not great, yet they are sufficiently clear to show 
that the human frame within a rather narrow range of 
alterations is capable of change. So far as we can 
clearly discover, there is no one evident tendency in 
these movements unless it is to produce individuals 
of larger size, and particularly of larger brain capacity, 
than the first of the genus, and to clear the body of the 
hair. The present writer is of the opinion that there 
is a prevailing tendency to certain slight modifications 
as, for instance, the enlargement of the great toe, and 
probably to a lessening in the size of the external ear. 
These changes, if they be real, show some fluctuation 
in the proportions of the human frame in the later- 
formed varieties of the kind; but they are far from 
indicating any tendency to depart widely from the 
primitive type by introducing new features, or by 
great modifications of those now in existence. 

It has frequently been suggested that the body of 
man might be indefinitely altered by a process of select¬ 
ive breeding — stirpiculture — as it has been termed, 
so that even the organic type could be changed. A9 
evidence of this it has been urged that the individual 
variations in the several human species are noteworthy, 
perhaps greater than in any other known species of 
mammal; by accumulating these diversities through 
systematic mating, it has seemed to some selectionists 
possible to vary the form without limit. Leaving aside 


156 Man and the Earth 

the moral objections to this scheme, we note the fact 
that the weight of evidence concerning the process of 
originating new species and genera is now to the effect 
that the innovations do not arise by the accumulation 
of slight variations, but through the occurrence of sud¬ 
den and great alterations, mutations as they are termed, 
which alterations have the value of new species. When 
the mutations occur, they are subjected to the selective 
process; if they are suited to the environment they 
abide; if they are unsuited thereto they disappear. 
Be it said that this view does not overthrow the hy¬ 
pothesis of natural selection. It merely transfers its 
effective action from slight variations, where it has 
always seemed to many able biologists of doubtful 
efficiency, to larger and therefore more easily selected 
and accumulated features. 

It is in his intelligence that we are to look for the 
important changes in the nature of man. In that part 
of his being we find a measure of variability the like 
of which exists nowhere else in the organic realm. 
Between the lowliest and the highest varieties of living 
men the difference in mental power is so great that if 
like variations existed in their bodily parts, they would 
be assigned to different orders or perhaps even diverse 
classes in the type of vertebrates. From the most in¬ 
ferior normally developed human intelligence and the 
noblest the interval, measured in like manner, would be 
vastly greater than between races or tribes of men. It 
is not excessive to say that it exceeds the anatomical 
range from the fishes to the highest mammalia. Were 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 157 

it not for the fact that these differences are hidden 
under the unforming mask of our human shape, they 
would be overwhelming in their effect, such indeed, 
as to take away all sense of kinship with our fellows. 
Thus, while measured by physical standards, we must 
assume that the earth is not likely to come by a new 
anatomical genus of man, and may never attain even 
so far as a new species differing from those now exist¬ 
ing as much as the Hottentot from the Aryan, it may 
come to know intellectual species, genera, and families 
of which we can form no conception. In the mind of 
man we have entered upon a new realm of life, one 
where development appears to have no such limitations 
as control the lower stage of anatomical history. 

While it must be reckoned an essentially vain en¬ 
deavor to forecast the psychic future of man in its 
fulness, there are certain trends which are evident and 
which concern our general problem as to the future of 
the earth. We see clearly enough that the best in¬ 
dicated of these trends is toward a more intimate as¬ 
sociation of the individual units of our societies. The 
primitive close-knit clan, with its family traditions 
as the basis of union, is now expanded into vast com¬ 
monwealths where millions are united in social en¬ 
deavors. This advance at every stage means the 
growing power of mankind as a geologic or change¬ 
bringing agent. We may expect to see this cooperative 
work, now but at its beginning, extended and affirmed 
until the folk of the time to come will be so united that 
their action will be as by one vast creature, controlled 


158 Man and the Earth 

by a sympathetic understanding which will make it 
effectively an individual in its deeds. This with the 
control of energy and means of application of forces 
will make man a geological agent of singular capacity; 
under his command a large share of the energy avail¬ 
able on the surface of the earth is to be applied to 
psychic ends. There are many ways in which the 
individual man is to become quite other than the man 
we know, but his world-might is to come from the 
economic sympathetic union of his endeavors. 

Perhaps the greatest organic advantage that the 
future man is to win will arise from his avoidance of 
the tax that disease puts upon him individually and 
upon his societies. In the infra-human life this tax 
is so slight as to be of small consequence, at least 
among the vertebrates; it is not great among the 
lowlier tribes for the reason that the habits of brutes 
and brutal men do not lend themselves to disease, and 
even more for the reason that maladies mean the 
speedy removal of the sufferers from the association, 
and, as the result of the selective process, the pro¬ 
tection of the stock from contaminating inheritances. 
It is when the weak come to be protected that the 
malady tax on the society in which they belong effect¬ 
ively begins. Thus the first result of sympathetic care 
for the invalid, that care which marks the first stage 
of the truly human society as distinguished from the 
mere herd, is to lower its capacity for action, so that 
in the existing conditions of our commonwealths the 
care devoted to the inactive absorbs probably near to 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 159 

one-half of their resources. There is reason to believe 
that we are now coming to a stage where the disease 
tax, which has hitherto mounted with the advances of 
culture, is to be diminished by the extirpation of mal¬ 
adies. This is evidently not to be accomplished by 
any hideous Spartan plan of destroying weak infants, 
but by a fitting care that such come rarely to life and 
that they do not send their weakness on to mar the 
race. We are rapidly coming to a sense that while 
the individual life has an absolute right to a seemly 
place in the world it has absolutely no inborn right 
to send its infirmities onward through the generations: 
that this question as to the fitness of the men to be 
belongs to the commonwealth and is to be determined 
by reason. It is also to be accomplished by the devel¬ 
opment of sanitation — in the larger sense of that large 
word — through which our kind is to effect the most 
important part of its difficult task of reconciliation 
with the environment. 

The phrase “ reconciliation with the environment ” 
has a much larger meaning in the case of man than in 
that of any other creature. With the lower forms it 
represents, it is true, a great complex of actions from 
within and without which have to be brought into a 
profitable equation. The adjustment is not only with 
climatal conditions, but with the doings of a myriad 
other claimants for a place in the world; but the de¬ 
mands of these lowlier individuals are relatively simple 
— they include no ideals beyond that of sufficient 
existence. With man, however, because of his ever- 


160 Man and the Earth 

expanding ideals and the desires they breed, the rec¬ 
onciliation is almost infinitely more difficult to effect. 
It is, indeed, unaccomplishable. Our kind may fairly 
be distinguished as a new type of being, one in which 
the movement toward adjustment with the surround¬ 
ings is on an asymptote, i. e., a curve which constantly 
approaches the straight line, but can never attain it. 
With each advance in this process new desires origi¬ 
nate, so that the finish to the process is infinitely re¬ 
mote, to be won only when he has in the largest sense 
of the word comprehended the realm. 

Turning to the matter of the permanence of the 
earth’s conditions during the sojourn of man upon it, 
let us consider how far we can reckon on these ex¬ 
ternal elements in the equation of the creature with 
the environment. It needs no other than familiar evi¬ 
dence to show that this sphere is very much alive — 
the geological record attests incessant change so far 
as we can see, never more active than in the time 
since man, at least in his bodily shape, came to be. 
The earth is still in its physical youth; none of its 
original functions show any sign of exhaustion. The 
senility which appears to have come to the planet 
Mars, and the death of physical and organic life which 
has evidently overtaken the inner planets Venus and 
Mercury — if indeed they have ever been the scene 
of life — is remote by millions of years from our 
sphere. Assuming that the whole of the planetary 
machinery, earth’s depths, air and sun, are combining 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 161 

still to keep the structure living, what then are the 
results to be expected in the foreseeable human time 
from the operation of these engines? 

As to the climate of the earth, all the evidence points 
to rapid changes within narrow, yet functionally very 
important limits, within a few hundred thousand years. 
That these limits are firmly set is shown by the fact 
that for a hundred million years or more the continu¬ 
ance of life on the earth has not been interrupted by 
any general excess of heat or cold. When we re¬ 
member that the temperature of space is about five 
hundred degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, that of 
the inner earth some ten thousand degrees, and of the 
sun perhaps ten times as much, and further that the 
limits of organic life are between 32° and 150° on 
that scale, we see how nicely the adjustment has been 
preserved. We see that we have reason to believe 
the workshop of the world is well enough ordered to 
admit the continued existence of man. 

The climatal changes we have to apprehend are those 
which will from time to time and from place to place 
bring about those extremes which are marked by the 
cold of the Arctic regions and the glaciated conditions 
of Greenland or that of the waterless deserts. The 
geological record shows that practically every part of 
the earth’s surface has known the vicissitudes of hu¬ 
midity and aridity in recent geologic periods, say since 
the beginning of the Tertiary period, and that the 
greater part of the areas poleward from the parallels 
of 40 0 have ranged in temperature from climates which 


11 


162 


Man and the Earth 


permitted our lower Mississippi valley plants to grow 
in Greenland, to enwrapping glaciers as far down as 
the Ohio and within sight of the Mediterranean. These 
changes have been frequent and, in a geological sense, 
sudden. They are least extensive in the tropical belt 
being, perhaps, lacking save in rare instances in all 
the lands where the sun comes to the zenith; they are 
most to be reckoned on in the regions beyond lati¬ 
tudes 30° in both hemispheres. 

So far as we can determine, the life of man took its 
human shape in the latter part of the Tertiary time, 
probably before the Pliocene period. At that time the 
climate, in the northern hemisphere at least, was much 
more even than at present when indeed the lands 
nearest the pole could have been tilled. In his begin¬ 
ning man was without doubt a tropical creature, but 
he probably pushed beyond that realm before the last 
great climatal change began, introducing one of the 
many glacial periods the earth has known. During 
that period, at least in its closing stages, we know him 
in Europe as a hunter of the mammoth — the long¬ 
haired elephant, a species which ranged up to the 
borders of the ice-fields. The evidence is fairly to 
the effect that our rude forefathers underwent the 
trials of the climate of the last glacial epochs, and as 
hunters, following the “ biggest game,” our kind has 
ever chased over ground where the glaciers in their 
successive advances and retreats brought an essentially 
Arctic climate. 

We are living in the declining stage of the last or 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 163 

pleistocene glacial period: just what is before us in 
the way of immediate climatal change is not yet clear. 
So far as the evidence goes, it is to the general effect 
that the change in this regard within the historic 
period is slight, but in the direction of greater cold 
and lessened rainfall throughout the northern hemi¬ 
sphere, especially in the region beyond the tropics. 
All the desert countries which have been carefully 
examined afford evidence to the effect that during the 
last glacial period they were the seats of abundant 
rainfall which has rapidly lessened in amount during 
the present epoch and seems to be still diminishing. 
We therefore may expect that the climatal cycle will 
be likely to carry the earth, or at least the northern 
hemisphere, into somewhat drier and possibly colder 
conditions than now exist. 

We know, as yet, too little concerning the causes 
of glacial periods to essay any prediction as to the 
times of their occurrence. It is most likely that they 
are not due to any one cause but to the conjunction 
of two groups of causations, those due to variations 
in the amount of the sun’s heat that falls on the earth 
or upon either of its hemispheres, and those that con¬ 
trol the distribution of that heat through variations 
in the shape of the lands and the consequent varia¬ 
tions in the course and volume of the ocean currents, 
such as the Gulf Stream and its mate that sweeps 
northwardly by Japan. It is beyond the limits of this 
writing to consider the exceedingly complicated prob¬ 
lem arising from the interaction of these diverse causes 


164 Man and the Earth 

of climatal change; for our purpose we need only 
note that the result of the complex is an incessant, 
and, in terms of earth durations, swift alteration 
within the above-mentioned narrow limits of the heat 
and moisture of the earth’s surface. In this process of 
change the glacial periods represent the times when 
the amount of snowfall in the cool season is greater 
than can be melted in the warmer part of the year. 
This condition occurs, at the present time, here and 
there on all the great lands except Australia. Rela¬ 
tively slight changes in the equation of the weather 
would sweep these ice-fields away, or extend them to 
a range so wide that we would have again the vast 
sheets of the glacial period. 

In the last ice age there were sundry epochs when 
the glaciers ranged far, separated by times of con¬ 
siderable duration when they shrunk back to the high¬ 
lands and poleward on the low ground. It may be 
that we are now in one of those intervals of retreat, 
and that within a hundred thousand years we may find 
life dispossessed from the greater part of the regions 
beyond the parallels of 40 0 in one or both hemispheres. 
So far as we can discover the change when it comes, 
as it pretty surely will come again, and probably often 
during the sojourn of man on the planet, the advent 
will be in the human sense slow, several thousand years 
elapsing before the desolating process goes so far as 
to interfere in a serious manner with the possessions 
of man. When it comes he will have to join the vast 
procession of life on its way to lower latitudes in a 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 165 

march such as the hosts of plants and animals have 
again and again made before this shape of death. 
In this movement there is no reason to expect that 
mankind will do more than suffer: we may fairly 
expect that the march toward the equator will be made 
in fit order, and the return in due time by this the 
highest as it has been by hosts of the lower life. 

The amount of injury that may be done to the 
interests of man in the far future from excessive dry¬ 
ness is fitly a subject of more anxiety than that due to 
recurrent glaciation. The ice times clearly are periods 
of more than normal humidity, so that while quite 
one-third of a continent, as in the case of North 
America, was during the last of them sterilized by 
the glacial sheet, the remainder was so much better 
watered that the field as a whole was probably as good 
a source of food as it is at present. We cannot safely 
reckon as to how far the present advancing desicca¬ 
tion may go, or how much it may diminish the life- 
sustaining capacity of the lands. We see some limit 
in the fact that the tropical belt, as a whole, shows 
little sign of ever having had much variation in its 
rainfall. We may therefore reckon that here will 
always be a safe refuge from the trials of high lati¬ 
tudes in the region about the equator: a realm which 
from the early geologic ages has been a kind of alms¬ 
house whereto the organic groups, beaten out in their 
struggle with the hard stresses in the regions near the 
poles, might retreat. These fields of the vertical sun 
have always been the place of refuge of creatures 


166 


Man and the Earth 


driven from those of varying and often destructive 
climates, such as we find near the poles. Thereto have 
shrunk the remaining species of elephants, rhinoceroses, 
and many other groups which once ranged as far as 
any of the mammalian series. 

The geographic changes which can be foreseen in 
the computable future of the earth are not such as 
can menace the success of man. His life, in common 
with that of all the higher plants and animals, depends 
upon the maintenance of those wrinkles of the earth’s 
hard surface which bring portions of it above the 
level of the sea in the form of continents. For the 
stage to serve the needs of the play it is necessary 
that these wrinkles shall grow up as fast as they are 
worn down by the winds, the rains, the glaciers, and 
the waves — else the actors will soon disappear with 
the stage. This balance between sea and land is of 
ancient institution and has been singularly well main¬ 
tained. The continents were in existence at least as 
far back as the Cambrian period, and probably since 
the beginnings of life on this sphere. When man 
departs pretty surely it will not be for a lack of dry 
land whereon to stay. 

The changes which are to be anticipated in the future 
geological periods will bring about many and consider¬ 
able alterations in the outlines of the existing great 
lands, but not their destruction. We know that the 
continental masses sway up in one part and down in 
another in curious alterations, but so far as we know, 
none of them, once established, has ever been destroyed. 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 167 

There is some reason to believe that there may have 
been a way by which the land life of South America 
came into intimate relations with that of South Africa 
and Australia about the Jurassic period, and some 
naturalists have conjectured that this shows that there 
was a continental land connection between these areas 
across the southern oceans. There is no evidence of 
such a vanished land having existed except the kinship 
of a limited number of species of animals, and this evi¬ 
dence can, from the point of view of dynamic geology, 
be better explained by the former existence of many 
volcanic islands now destroyed, or by the migration of 
the creatures from some common point of origin to 
those widely separated areas than by the destruction 
of such a vast and abnormally shaped land as has been 
conjectured. We may accept the continents as very 
ancient establishments and believe that they will out- 
endure this abiding creature man. 

The changes that may be looked forward to in 
the continents during the probable human occupancy 
of their fields, are mainly in the gradual extension 
of their areas. So far as we can see, this process of 
enlargem'ent has steadfastly been in progress since 
these structures began to take shape in the early geo¬ 
logic time. They most likely occupy more of the 
earth’s surface at present than in any earlier period. 
There is reason to believe that the additions will be 
in the immediate future at least due not to the devel¬ 
opment of any new continental area, but to the general 
uplifting of those that exist, and to the baring of the 


168 


Man and the Earth 

shallower sea bottoms near the existing shores. These 
shallows appear as a very generally developed con¬ 
tinental shelf, fringing the shores in a general way, 
the shelf apparently having been formed of the waste 
borne from the land and heaped high on the sea floor 
along with the debris of organic life. This continental 
shelf or fringe of shallows is more or less extensive 
along all the shores of the great lands. It is particu¬ 
larly well developed about the North Atlantic, where 
it has an average width of about one hundred miles 
and a depth on its outer edge of some five hundred 
feet; from that margin the sea bottom descends with 
a tolerably steep slope to the abyssal depths of the sea. 
As the continents, gradually, irregularly, but on the 
whole, steadfastly rise, this ever-growing shelf is 
brought into the state of dry land. 

The process of elevating the continental shelf above 
the sea is complicated by the continual swaying up and 
down of the sea bottom which now lifts and now 
lowers the oceanic plane. Since the ice-sheets passed 
'from this continent and Europe, there has been one 
of these upward movements of the water level to the 
extent of two to five hundred feet affecting, of course, 
all the shores of the connected seas. The movement 
appears to have taken place with such rapidity that 
the waves did not have time to break up the forest 
beds as they passed over them; this is shown by the 
fact that all about the world we find these submerged 
forests along with river valleys which have been 
flooded in their lower reaches by the invading sea. 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 169 

This last upward movement of the ocean level, due 
to an uplifting of some part of its bottom, probably 
in the Pacific Ocean, somewhat diminished the area 
of the continents. Supposing that it amounted to as 
much as 500 feet of elevation, the lessening of the dry 
land area may be safely reckoned as, at least, one- 
twentieth of the whole as it stood before the move¬ 
ment began. The existence of sea-beaches, at heights 
much above the present shore lines in most parts of 
the world, shows that in recent geological periods the 
sea has been on the average much higher than it now 
is; so that we cannot say whether its next movements 
will be upward or downward. The only safe presage 
is that the present situation is impermanent and is 
shortly to be followed by other changes in the rela¬ 
tive height of sea and land. But, as before suggested, 
these alterations in no wise menace the perpetuity of 
land life: that life on any continent has continued 
without interruption for many geological periods and 
is doubtless to be further continued for all the time 
that we can in any clear way foresee. 

Next in importance in the field of geological change 
come the mountainous breaks of the earth’s crust. 
These are to grow upward and to be worn downward 
in the time to come or in the time before; but there 
is no reason to believe that the result will be any 
serious disturbance in the conditions of land life. There 
is reason to believe that all of our higher mountains 
are at this day growing at quite as rapid a rate on 
the average as they have ever grown. Yet we see 


170 Man and the Earth 

that the process goes on with such steadfastness that, 
save for an occasional quake of the earth, there is 
nothing to indicate the action of the vast forces which 
bring the slow movements about. These earthquakes 
are formidable enough, yet we see that in Japan, a 
field where, on the whole, they are the most violent 
and frequent of those in any part of the earth, they 
are not inconsistent with a high civilization and the 
utmost profit from the earth. Therefore we may 
safely reckon that this part of the earth’s mechan¬ 
ism will in no considerable measure interfere with 
the use of the earth by man. 

As for volcanic action, all the evidence goes to show 
that it is a fairly constant element in the earth’s proc¬ 
esses. Within the historic period it has been con¬ 
tinuously at about the same rate. Now and then an 
eruption, such as that of Krakatoa in 1883, or ^ ie 
more recent outbreaks in the Antilles, because of its 
violence or its effects on mankind, suggests that there 
is grave danger from this might of the under-earth. 
In fact, however, the loss of life from this action 
is far less than that from any of the common dis¬ 
eases of our kind — vastly less than from war or 
famine. Nor is it at all likely that the world will ever 
know a time when the outbursts of volcanoes will be 
more serious than they now are. This action appears 
to be due to the inclosure of water in the stratified 
rocks at the time when they are laid down on the sea 
floor; this crevice water becomes heated as the rocks 
become deeply buried, and, by the central heat, is 


The Changes to Come in the Human Period 171 

brought to an exploding strain. The process is con¬ 
stant and its manifestations appear to be uniform and 
little disturbing to the life the earth bears. 

The foregoing sketch suggests some of the reasons 
why we may look forward with an assured mind to 
the future of man on this planet. He is young, and 
the sphere for all its age still young. We may well 
rejoice in our anticipation of the great and long- 
continued work they are to do together before their 
great task is done. 


X 

THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH 


N OT the least important question as to the future 
of the earth when it has become completely 
domesticated concerns its expression to the 
eyes and mind of man, the beauty that it may then 
convey to beholders as it does to us in our time. There 
are those who feel that an intensely humanized earth, 
so arranged as to afford a living to the largest possible 
number of men, will lack much of the charm that it 
has now; that it will become so far artificial that its 
primitive nature will be utterly lost. A careful ex¬ 
amination of the conditions will show us that while 
the order of beauty is doubtless to be greatly changed 
by the hand of man, there is reason to believe that 
the alterations will enhance its aesthetic value, making 
its features far more contributive to spiritual enlarge¬ 
ment than they were in their primal wilderness state. 
To discuss the reasons for this belief it will be neces¬ 
sary to set forth in brief the naturalist’s view as to 
the place of the sesthetic motive in organic life, so 
that we may see how safely we may reckon on its 
development and control of man’s conduct in the 
future. 

It needs but a glance at the realm of animals and 
plants to make it plain that their qualities are largely 


The Beauty of the Earth 173 

shaped by influences that make for beauty. Their 
forms, colors, even their features of association that 
enter into landscape effects, are so ordered that they 
afford delight. In larger part these elements of beauty 
are due to natural actions, to the operation of forces 
that are absolutely beyond the control of the indi¬ 
vidual, and are hardly more to be termed organic than 
those that give rise to the shapeliness of crystals, to 
mountain outlines, or the order of the celestial spheres. 
In part, however, and this is a most important fact, 
this beauty is due to the deliberate intellectual choice 
of some one of the many animals that are engaged, 
even as we are, in an effort, however unconscious, to 
embody their conceptions of beauty in the objects they 
shape. 

Although the extent to which the lower animals have 
by choice contributed to the beauty of the world is, as 
yet, but little known, for the reason that the subject 
has only come into the field of enquiry within the last 
half-century, it is already clear that what they have 
effected is, in quantity, great, and in quality, of a very 
high order, measured in terms of our best human art. 
Thus the beauty of the flowers of all those plants which 
have colored and shapely corollas is unquestionably 
due to the choice of insects who are attracted to them 
by those features which attract us. These blossoms 
are, in effect, like tavern signs set up to tempt the moth 
or bee to visit the plant, there to be regaled with the 
nectar or pollen, and by its visit to effect the process 
of fertilization in the desired way. In this manner, 


Man and the Earth 


I 74 

by this or that device of beauty in form, hue, or scent, 
the plant appeals to the insect’s mind, to its sense of 
the aesthetic, and by the result gives us proof that even 
in this lowly state of mental development the desire 
for the beautiful is kindred to our own. 

In a very great number of insects, including repre¬ 
sentatives of nearly all the main groups of that class, 
as well as of the spiders and their kindred, the aesthetic 
motive of the creatures is well shown in the results, 
of sexual selection, which leads to the evolution of 
such beauty as we find in the wings of the butterflies 
and moths, the coloring of spiders, and a host of other 
ornamental features. Although this result arising from 
the selection of males on the basis of their beauty is 
much commingled with others due to protective mim¬ 
icry, it remains clear enough to warrant us in believing 
that in many species of this class the sense of beauty, 
though of course quite unconscious to the possessor, is 
far stronger and more dominant than in mankind. 

When we come to the vertebrates, we find in all the 
classes evidence that the motive of beauty is quite as 
manifest as in the lower realms of life. In them we 
find it shown, as in the lower life, both in the organic 
control that shapes the creatures to harmony, and in 
the individual choice of mates that leads to the seleo 
tion of the most charming and, through that action, 
to the accumulation of beautiful features. Both these 
methods of attaining the common end are well ex¬ 
hibited in the fishes and the reptiles and, less distinctly, 
in the amphibians. When we come to the birds, the 


The Beauty of the Earth 175 

lineal successors of the reptilia, we find the quality 
of beauty more predominant and nearer to our own 
kindred emotions than in any other class of animals, 
even that in which we belong. Moreover, in the birds 
the beauty is to a greater extent the result of the selec¬ 
tion which the female makes of its mate at the time 
of pairing. The result is that these creatures are, to 
us, the most beautiful of all organic shapes. 

That the sense of beauty in the birds is not altogether 
limited to their sexual habits is fairly well shown by 
the fact that their nests often have a grace that seems 
to be attributable to a wider-ranging aesthetic motive, 
a measure of care beyond what is required for mere 
utility, or often given to them apparently to satisfy 
a desire for shapeliness. In one species, at least — the 
“ bower bird ” — the pair, or the members of a covey, 
decorate an assembly place with bits of bright-colored 
objects which apparently serve for ornament, for they 
cannot be for any other service. Add to these visible 
indications going to show a sense of beauty that derived 
from their songs, which, though perhaps not in a strict 
sense musical, are unquestionably charming, and we 
have a combination that clearly indicates a high de¬ 
velopment of the aesthetic sense. 

It is an interesting fact that, as a group, the mam¬ 
malia below man, and particularly in the series that 
leads toward him, manifest much less of the aesthetic 
motive than in any other great division of animals. 
In the sub-class of marsupials, the kindred of the 
opossum and the kangaroo, there is but little trace of 


176 Man and the JLarth 

sexual ornament, and that of insignificant aesthetic 
value. In the higher sub-class, that of the placentalia, 
to which we belong, we find that some of the diversions 
from the main stem, such as the deer, antelopes, and 
the kindred of the cats, have by sexual selection ac¬ 
quired a certain measure of ornament in color and 
structure, such as antlers and banded or mottled hides, 
in no instance, however, comparable to the attainment 
of the birds. I11 the central part of the class, that 
which led toward man, sexual selection, as far as it 
has acted at all, has given shapes and colorings that 
are not beautiful, and in the apes may often fairly be 
classed as obscene. Of all the varied aspects of this 
group not one can be termed charming; they may, as 
a whole, be reckoned as the most hideous of animals. 
Moreover, in all the nearer brute kindred of man we 
find no collateral indications of an aesthetic sense, no 
shapely structure, no sexual calls having any quality 
of song, unless possibly in the howling monkeys 
wherein, according to some observers, the notes of the 
cry run through an octave. 

With an essentially unaesthetic ancestry, extending 
through thousands of species from the level of the 
amphibia, man comes to his life as man, as it would 
seem from the point of view of the aesthetic, the most 
hopeless creature on the planet. But here we find 
a marvel, perhaps the most wonderful of all that beset 
our passage from brute to man. As for all his other 
powers, his rationality, his sympathies, all else that 
goes to make his mind, we find that humanizing means 


The Beauty of the Earth 177 

no more than a swift and vast enlargement of the 
qualities that existed in the lower stages of his develop¬ 
ment. In the history of the aesthetic motive in man 
we come upon a sudden change in quality. The very 
lowest of his kind, the Andaman Islander and the 
lower African tribes, exhibit little, if any more sense 
of beauty than we find in the anthropoid apes. The 
evidence from these and other primitive tribes is to 
the effect that our genus did not begin with men who 
showed any kind of aesthetic spirit. On the con¬ 
trary, their first steps in constructive work, their huts, 
weapons, clothing, and utensils are lacking in grace; 
they show that the sense of beauty had not yet awak¬ 
ened. As soon, however, as some skill in fashioning 
objects was attained, we note at once that the art motive 
is aroused. The original rude flint, no further shaped 
than would serve its clumsy purpose, is now fashioned 
with grace and with laborious patience dressed to 
graceful form: at once in a great diversity of races 
and tribes this motive of beauty swiftly enlarges until 
the men can do no manner of work that does not 
embody it. 

This is not the place to consider the combination of 
impulses which inevitably lead all kinds of men, though 
in varying measure, to an awakening of the aesthetic 
sense — for it is a large and obscure problem. For 
our purpose, we need do no more than recognize the 
fact that the search for the beautiful is due to an in¬ 
stinct which naturally awakens in man as soon as he 
obtains command of the skill of hand sufficient to 


12 


Man and the Earth 


178 

express his state of mind in fashioning things. We 
should also see that the results of this motive are in 
aesthetic quality essentially like those which owe their 
character to the minds of insects, as expressed in the 
beauty of flowers or the sexually selected ornament 
of the birds. In a word, the facts indicate that the 
sense and love of the beautiful is an essential quality 
of mind; that while it may long lie dormant, as it 
was in the mammalian ancestry of man, it remains 
unimpaired in its possibilities, ready to enter control- 
lingly into action as soon as the chance is afforded. 
The main fact is to see how the world over, apparently 
among hundreds of tribal associations, this motive 
sprang up and at once took its place as the equal of 
any of those primal impulses which were inherited 
from the infra-human series all the way back to the 
beginnings of intellectual life. 

Although the aesthetic motive in mankind when 
aroused was at once strong, it lacked the coherence and 
the certainty in its actions which we find in the lower 
life. Thus our art work is not so surely beautiful as 
that of the birds or the insects. Whole groups of 
men have for a time lapsed into mere fashion, or 
have lost their once well-developed aesthetic sense. 
Nevertheless the onward march of this impulse has 
been, on the whole, more continuous than is the case 
with any other of those developed within mankind. 
The alterations of the interest never seem to occut 
save where there is a breach in the conditions of its 
development, such as has taken place in the passage 


The Beauty of the Earth 179 

from household technics to systematic modern factory 
work. So long as it is a question of the solitary mind 
and the separate complete work the motive remains 
true. On the other hand, the extension of the impulse 
with the advance in human associations is remarkably 
great: beginning with the savage and his arms or his 
clay vessels, we find at each upward step in culture a 
widening of the field of art interest. At first it relates 
to personal affairs; it extends thence to the decoration 
of temples and of palaces, then to detached art in 
sculpture and painting. Finally, in the later stages 
of civilization, it begins to occupy the field of the land¬ 
scape, first in forms of gardening closely united with 
architecture and sculpture, and finally with the land¬ 
scape apart from all the accessories derived from other 
arts. 

It needs but little enquiry into the history of the 
aesthetic perception of the landscape to show that while 
the motive was felt by many rather primitive peoples, 
it is the last of the fields of beauty to be widely opened 
to the appreciation of men. Among the Greeks there 
was a certain measure of sensitiveness to the charm 
of color and movement in the landscape, but little of 
that of form. A curious instance of this is to be found 
in the topography of Athens. On the north of the 
town, and fairly within it, there is the most interesting 
and beautiful hill in the Attic plain. This hill, Lyca- 
betus, rises to about double the height of the acropolis, 
and is a far more picturesque object. It is, indeed, 
the leading feature in the scenery of the field, in a 


180 Man and the Earth 

way controlling the whole view, yet it appears to have 
been quite unappreciated by the people who dwelt be¬ 
side it, though their aesthetic perceptions in all save 
matters of the landscape were more highly developed 
than they have ever been in any land or time. So far 
as I can learn, there is but one mention of this mount 
in classic times, which if near any of our modern 
centres of culture would have found a large place in 
literature. There is no allusion to the surpassing 
beauty of the landscape visible from its summit, yet 
it must have been known to every one who dwelt in 
Athens. 

The interest of the Romans in the beauty of nature 
was even as slight as that of the Greeks. We find 
with Virgil a sense of the charm in the humanized 
landscape, and now and then, though seldom, a note 
of a wider appreciation that extends to some of the 
primitive aspects of the world; yet it is still with 
reference to men that it interests him and not for the 
pure nature of it. In the last of the poets of the 
classic period, in Rutilius Naumatianus, we find a touch 
of the spirit which is truly modern when the scene 
is valued for itself. After Rutilius there is a break of 
some eight centuries, when we come to the modern 
awakening, the so-called period of the new birth. 
From that time the growth in the appreciation of the 
landscape has been steadfast, though in greater part 
since the seventeenth century. It has mainly affected 
the peoples of western Europe, though it is exhibited 
as well in the art of Japan. 


The Beauty of the Earth 181 

The whole history of the landscape appreciation 
clearly shows that this extension of the aesthetic sense 
is the result of a natural process of development in 
which the spirit of man, at first intent on those things 
alone which immediately and personally concerned him, 
has, with the widening of his understanding, gone 
ever further afield until now it compasses the visible 
realm. We see that the sense of beauty is the com¬ 
panion of knowledge and that it is certain to keep its 
place in all the interests of man. We see, too, that 
it is naturally keenest in those fields where the will 
of man affects the expression. The absolute wilder¬ 
ness, however noble in its aspect, has esthetic interest 
for relatively few persons. Even to them it lacks the 
charm of the fields that bear the impress of the hand 
of man. They need to be peopled in our sight or 
in our imagination, so that by sympathy we feel that 
we ourselves are commingled with it. Hence it is that 
only the more expanded souls can rejoice in the un¬ 
trodden deserts, the pathless woods, or the mountains 
that have no trace of culture. Such people these 
places with their fancy — at least they feel the Lord 
is there: and so they have their bond with what else 
would be utterly strange to them. 

The main point of this rather far-going yet in¬ 
sufficient account of the perception of landscape values 
is that the motive may safely be reckoned on in esti¬ 
mating the future of the care that is to be devoted 
to insuring the beauty of the earth. We see that the 
work of the landscape architect, effectively begun less 


182 


Man and the Earth 

than a century ago, is now advancing more rapidly 
than that of any other profession. At first it con¬ 
cerned gardens alone, the aim being to supplement 
the accomplishments of the architect by uniting his 
structures with the surrounding nature, so that there 
might be no jarring to the eye in the sudden passage 
from the artificial to the natural. Thence the duty of 
these artists has been extended to the care of parks 
and public reservations which, beginning with the 
commons of England, the play-grounds of rulers, and 
the spaces kept open for the defence of strongholds, 
have extended until every city has come to regard 
such holdings for the use of its people as necessary 
even as the streets and schools. 

A concomitant of this development of the land¬ 
scape architect’s profession is the growth among all 
classes of men above the lowest of a sense of the 
beautiful in nature. A century ago travel, except for 
trade purposes, was limited to the very few — not one 
in a hundred journeyed to look upon the world. Now 
it is safe to say that practically all the folk who con¬ 
trol our states regard their contemplation of natural 
beauty as one of the rewards of life. It does not 
matter that they, as yet, do not see with the trained 
eyes and mind attuned to the best; the vital point is 
that they have the hunger. As regards this art of the 
wide nature, they are in the state of the primitive 
man when he began to make his stone implements 
shapely: the work was, for a time, ill done, but it 
held the sure promise of noble growth. 


The Beauty of the Earth 183 

We may now clearly discern that the landscape 
architect is no longer mainly to be concerned with 
beautifying patches of the earth with his clever con¬ 
trivances of open spaces and vistas. His real part 
is hereafter to care for the beauty of wide realms. 
The principle is well accepted that all the larger in¬ 
terests of man, those where the direction of affairs 
cannot safely be intrusted to individuals or corpora¬ 
tions, shall be in the control of the commonwealth. 
Such matters as public health and education, navi¬ 
gable streams, roads, and bridges, are now recognized 
as in the hands of the state. We are quite ready for 
the extension of this concept of duty to the held of 
aesthetic values, and we may confidently reckon that 
in the immediate future we shall have at least the 
beginnings of an effective care for those aspects of 
the earth which are of value to the spirit of man. 

In forecasting the future of aesthetic values of the 
earth, we should take account of the fact that the 
oceans are unchangeable by the hand of man: they 
may lose their majestic loneliness as they become more 
peopled by ships, but here the wilderness quality will 
ever remain. So too with the strip of shoreland 
which they desolate. Save for the results of brutal 
misuse, which may readily be avoided, this debatable 
fringe of the land may retain its pristine quality. Of 
the continental expanses quite one-fourth of the area, 
so long as the earth’s climate remains as it now is, 
will be unfit for tillage and only contributive to man’s 
needs by its forests or its mines. Thus the arctic 


184 Man and the HLarth 

sixth part of North America, being fairly beyond the 
reach of agriculture, must remain a wilderness save 
for the scanty population that its mineral wealth may 
support. The same is the case with its arid deserts 
of the Cordilleran field. For all that may be won 
from them by irrigation, they are to stay-in their 
barrenness even as the seas. Add to such natural 
reservations the higher mountains, and we have even 
on this rather happy continent quite one-third of its 
area which is to retain its natural aspect, so that all 
men may for all time have a chance to behold the 
primal realm in its nobler shape. 

On the other continents, the fields reserved by nature 
from the occupation of man are, on the average, quite 
as extensive as in North America. In Eurasia they 
form an even larger part of the land area, as is the 
case also in Australia, where probably not one-half 
of the surface will ever know any kind of tillage. 
In Africa not over two-thirds can be reckoned as of 
economic value. In South America alone is the pro¬ 
portion greater. In that continent the man-sustaining 
soils may be found to occupy four-fifths of the sur¬ 
face. It is thus evident that the first question in the 
future of the earth’s natural beauty concerns the care 
that should be given to these inevitable wildernesses. 
On this point it is to be noted that the American 
government has, without formal design, made an ex¬ 
tended experiment in this class of undertakings, an 
experiment which gives promise of being the type of 
such work. Beginning with the Yellowstone Park, 


i8 S 


The Beauty of the Barth 

the American government has in succession set aside 
a considerable part of the national domain to be pre¬ 
served in its natural state,- kept free from the depre¬ 
dations of hunters or the defacements of business. 
These holdings in the interest of mankind now include 
the most important part of the scenery of the Cordil¬ 
leras, between Canada and Mexico, and we may be 
reasonably sure that these areas are effectively pre¬ 
served for all foreseeable time. 

It is interesting to note that the principle of keep¬ 
ing untouched the choicest parts of the American land¬ 
scape has not only met the unquestioning approval of 
all of its people, but the system has fairly been adopted 
into the life of the folk. The inhabitants of the far 
West are not only eager to have new reservations 
made, and those already established well cared for, 
but those of the East are willing to tax themselves 
heavily to redeem from private ownership the more 
important parts of their landscape that are in danger 
of defacement. We may fairly reckon that this mo¬ 
tive, though as yet mainly limited to the United 
States, will become awakened in all civilized coun¬ 
tries, in such measure that care will be taken to pre¬ 
serve the most valuable elements of the earth’s natural 
beauty. 

In estimating the needs of care for the safety of the 
beauty of the earth it is evident that there are two 
important groups of these features which are in im¬ 
minent danger of irretrievable damage: these are the 
primeval forests and the streams with their waterfalls. 


18 6 


Man and the Earth 

As for the forests, the reservations such as have been 
made in the Cordilleras abundantly provide for the 
preservation of sufficient samples. Though they will 
have to serve as sources of timber, and must thereby 
lose some of their pristine quality, they will retain 
their essential beauty as landscape features unharmed. 

While the western protected areas are sufficient to 
ensure for the future samples of all the best of its 
woods, the Appalachian section of the continent is 
not thus guarded. The broad-leaved woods of the 
Ohio valley, those of the southern pine, the noblest of 
its group, and the northern species of white pine, 
which is at its best in New England, need immediate 
care lest they be utterly destroyed. There is no land 
in the East in government control, so that this ward¬ 
ing will have to be done by purchase. It can effect¬ 
ively be brought about by two commonwealth parks 
of relatively small extent, one including the higher 
mountain district of North Carolina, with a small 
share of the lower valleys, in all about half a million 
acres, the other including the White Mountains of 
New Hampshire of about like area. These two reser¬ 
vations will cost about as much as two battleships, a 
trifle in the reckonings of the nation, but unlike the 
warships they will abide forever. 

There is in this country yet another most desirable 
reservation — that of the Everglades of Florida, where 
there is a bit of nature the like of which is not found 
elsewhere, a field of unique beauty, that has not, as 
yet, and may never have, any value for the uses of 


The Beauty of the Earth 187 

civilized man. Not the least of its interest consists 
in the fact that it is the dwelling-place of the Semi¬ 
nole Indians, who escaped deportation beyond the 
Mississippi at the end of the wars in the first half of the 
nineteenth century. These people having been exempt 
from the control of the government, and practically 
so from contact with the whites, are the least changed 
of any aborigines in this country. A reservation here 
would not deprive our race of any notable economic 
values and would be a refuge for the most interesting 
remnant of the eastern tribes of American aborigines. 

To do for the world at large what has so far been 
done in this country that we may assume its comple¬ 
tion, will require a like system of deliberately chosen 
reservations on all the continents. These cannot be 
at once reckoned either as to their fit place or their 
extent. It is, however, evident that they will have to 
be in something like the proportion that they are 
clearly to have in America, including in general be¬ 
tween a fiftieth and a hundredth part of the surface, 
yet not- sacrificing any noteworthy part of the economic 
values of the earth. It may well be that from the 
timber they will afford they will, in an economic sense, 
justify their establishment. 

Speculating on the possible position and extent of 
these reservations we see that they may well serve as 
harborages for many of the mammals and birds which 
else are sure of being swept away. Thus in Africa, 
in the region about the head-waters of the Nile, a 
reservation might well be established where a large 


18 8 


Man and the Earth 


part of the important mammalian species now near 
extinction could be preserved. There also, if the de¬ 
structive process of civilizing the lower tribes of 
men could be avoided, we might hope to maintain 
sundry interesting varieties of our kind, now as cer¬ 
tain to be destroyed as the giraffe or the African 
elephant. It may seem unreasonable to abandon an 
area of fifty thousand square miles, say as large as 
New York, to savagery, but if we consider the matter 
we will see that the primitive life of the world has 
its claim to existence quite as well as that of our 
civilizations. 

Turning again to the question of preserving the 
beautiful aspects of the earth, we note that the streams 
and lakes are the most likely of all natural features 
to suffer from the action of man. In some ways this 
damage is unavoidable. The need of power, the most 
immediate and far-reaching of all man’s necessities, 
is certain to destroy our waterfalls and rapids and 
to reduce all our rivers to a series of lake-like pools. 
This is their certain fate in a few generations from 
the present time, save when they enter the reservations 
where they are to be kept as samples of what they 
were when the earth was free. On the other hand, 
the lesser lakes are likely to retain much of their 
pristine beauty. Here and there they will be drained 
away that their bottoms may be tilled. In many in¬ 
stances they will be so controlled by dams as to retain 
the flood water of the rainy season to supply wheels 
in the dry season. This, by making a variable level, 


The Beauty of the Barth 189 

is somewhat harmful to the beauty of the shores, yet 
it will not be generally so. 

If we would forecast the aspect of the lands when 
the earth is completely domesticated, we can do so in 
a fairly accurate way by visiting some of the centres 
of the highest culture, such as are to be found in 
England, Holland, Egypt, or wherever men and 
wealth are most crowded: there we find beauty of a 
high order. It lacks, it is true, that quality of the 
primal which the wilderness alone can give, but in 
place of that single note of the deeps we have the 
great harmony of man’s life. In the time to come 
this beauty of culture will be ordered as it is not now, 
so that the use of the earth may give harmonies with 
no discords. The nobility of the primitive fitly recog¬ 
nized may have its due place, even in an earth sub¬ 
jugated to the uses of man. 


XI 


THE FUTURE OF NATURE UPON 
THE EARTH 


T HAT the title of this chapter may not be 
enigmatical, let us understand that by na¬ 
ture is meant the primitive species of animals 
and plants and their associations, the physical con¬ 
ditions which give the earth its expression; in fine, 
the assemblage of objects and actions that make up 
the wilderness when it is untouched by the hand of 
man. It is evident that all this is to undergo a great 
change by that same masterful hand of the supremely 
wilful creature whose progressive desires are likely 
to leave little, save with deliberate purpose, of the 
shapes that the ancient order established. We see, 
already, vast alterations since those desires began to 
expand. Half the land has lost its pristine aspect; 
many of the greater woods are gone to their rem¬ 
nants; hosts of animals have been destroyed, and 
other species once wide-ranging and dominant are 
reduced to scattered bands and are on the verge of 
extinction. The life of the world has learned of its 
new master in wide-spread slaying and subjugation. 
The question is as to the measure of it that the awak¬ 
ening reason of the tyrant may leave. 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 191 

First let us note that the organic species of the 
earth — animals and plants together, including the in¬ 
visibly small as well as the visible — probably number 
between two and three million. We know as yet little 
concerning the microscopic forms, such as the bacteria, 
save when they are forced on our prying attention by 
their interference with our affairs. For all we know 
or are likely soon to learn, the number of these kinds 
may be as great as those of the other visible forms 
of life. It is by no means likely that our means of 
exploring the world of the small are or can be 
made sufficiently effective to reveal the least of these 
creatures. 

Organic life does not consist, as some think, in a 
mere huddle of living objects contending with each 
other for a place in the world. It is rather a group 
of vast associations in which the species, each repre¬ 
senting certain capacities and powers, are united as 
in a commonwealth. It is true that some prey upon 
others and most are competing with rivals for a chance 
to live, as is the case in our human societies; but for 
all the contention these great combined faunas and 
floras, these organic hosts of the earth, are effectively 
balanced organizations, the order of their relations 
having been determined by endless trials through the 
geological ages in which they have been developed. 

We may see a little of this adjustment of species to 
species in an organic host when we consider the history 
of what we may term weeds, be they plant or animal. 
It is characteristic of all these excessively successful 


192 Man and the Earth 

species that they are new-comers in the fields they in¬ 
fest, brought in from some other province where they 
are so adjusted to the species with which they have 
long been in contact that there they have no more than 
a fair chance to develop. In the region where they 
are weeds or pests they are not checked by their ancient 
rivals and enemies, species educated to contend with 
them, and so they run riot in their new-found freedom. 
This is the case not only with a host of plants, but many 
animals as well. The hares brought to Australia from 
Europe were in their native country kept in check by 
several carnivorous animals, foxes, weasels, etc., but 
the immigrants, not finding any effective enemies in 
their new country, became weeds — species with a 
measure of freedom none have in an adjusted assem¬ 
blage of life. These weeds usually have their success 
in the tilled fields and not in the wildernesses; there 
they are apt to be beaten off by the well-organized 
forces of the natural life. 

Now and then, in the natural order, there enters 
into these temporarily balanced organic hosts some 
species developed in its midst or introduced from some 
other field, a species which disturbs the original order. 
Usually, however, as above noted, the original occu¬ 
pants of the fauna and flora hold their ground so well 
that the solitary invaders have no chance to estab¬ 
lish themselves: the changes are likely to occur not by 
haphazard immigration of species, but by the move¬ 
ment of the organic host as a whole under conditions 
of climatal or geographic change, which permit or 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 193 

compel assemblages to move this way or that over 
the surface of the land or the floor of the seas. The 
one exception to this general truth is in the case of man. 
He alone by his militant and progressive desires has 
become the successful invader of all the organic prov¬ 
inces — the supremely successful weed. 

In his primitive state before he became in any con¬ 
siderable extent a tool-maker, man appears to have 
been limited in his distribution, much as are the lower 
animals; but in proportion as he became endowed 
with fire, clothing, weapons, and other tools, his capac¬ 
ity to invade increased and his efficiency in destroying 
the inherited order of organic life rapidly augmented. 
We see the stage to which this has attained; we 
clearly foresee that it is as yet in its mere beginning, 
and that the original complexion of life is to remain 
only so far as man desires to leave it as nature made 
it. On the supposition that man is soon to begin to 
manage the life of the planet,, not, as at present, in an 
accidental and generally destructive manner, but ration¬ 
ally and with a view to keeping and leaving it in a 
shape to be good for his successors, let us see what 
we can forecast as to the direction and results of his 
endeavors.. 

We may assume that the progress of man in the 
subjugation of the planet will eventually lead to the 
further disturbance of the ancient organic order. In 
fact these overturnings will be inevitable, as was the 
destruction of the North American bison, because most 
wild species of large size cannot maintain themselves 
13 


Man and the Earth 


194 

save in large numbers and with a measure of freedom 
not possible where the land is to serve the needs of 
man. In part the destruction will be due to the fact 
that the creatures are on the natural way to extermi¬ 
nation, as was the case with the dodo and the great 
auk, the hand of man giving no more than the last 
touch in the series of actions that brought the end. 
In some part the elimination of species will be due to 
the fact that the creatures are directly harmful to 
man. The tiger and its kindred among the mam¬ 
mals, sundry venomous serpents, and, perhaps, a few 
other vertebrates, will on this account have to be 
eliminated. Yet in this great group of back-boned 
animals there is certainly not one per cent, of the 
forms that by their habits warrant extermination. 

In the life below the vertebrates we find the groups 
of animals and plants where the interests of mankind 
demand extensive destruction; yet there are only three 
of the many classes where such work is seriously called 
for. These are the bacteria, certain plasmodiums, and 
certain limited families of insects. The bacteria have 
a bad name, but of the vast host of their species there 
may be no more than a few score, possibly less, that 
harm man or his domesticated animals and plants. 
The greater number do work which from our point of 
view is beneficent, in some cases absolutely necessary 
for the maintenance of organic life. Of the plasmo¬ 
diums we know that some forms are harmful, as they 
are the source of fevers. As a whole, these lowly or¬ 
ganisms are to man by far the most inimical of all 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 195 

organisms: certainly more than half, probably more 
than three-fourths of the deaths in his species are due 
to their action; all the other agents of death save _pld 
age are of relatively trifling importance. His largest 
and most difficult task is to eradicate these mighty, 
though invisible, enemies. 

From the Protozoa to the insects it is interesting to 
note that there is not a species which can be regarded 
as a serious enemy of man or of his domesticated ani¬ 
mals. Some few, as the slugs, prey upon his gardens, 
the sea-nettles may sting him or, in the tropics, the 
land-crabs may become a nuisance, and certain worms 
are the source of serious diseases, but from this great 
field of life he experiences at most but limited ills. 
When we come to the group of insects we find quite 
other conditions: there is a host of species which 
directly or indirectly bring us calamities. As is now 
well known, in the mosquitoes and the flies they trans¬ 
mit the bacteria and plasmodiums which produce 
malarial, typhoid, and yellow fever, and probably other 
maladies. The servants of man, the domesticated ani¬ 
mals and plants, suffer even as much as their master 
from insect scourges; in fact, agriculture and herding 
have from the beginning had to war with these 
creatures which, by their adaptability to the condi¬ 
tions of other life, their marvellous energy and swift 
increase, are able to assail as no other creatures can. 

The history of the ravages of the locusts in North 
Africa and elsewhere shows that it is possible for an 
insect profoundly to affect or even to exterminate a 


Man and the Earth 


196 

civilization. We are just now on the way of a momen¬ 
tous experiment of this nature in America. A species 
known as the Gypsy Moth, long and unhappily known 
as a pest in Europe, has recently been introduced in 
eastern Massachusetts. In its new environment, 
where the few enemies that in the old world contend 
against it are lacking, the species is spreading stead¬ 
fastly and certainly. Where it is allowed freely to in¬ 
crease for a few years, it develops in such multitudes 
that it devours all kinds of vegetation, that of the forests 
as well as of the tilled ground. So far, in its spread it 
has come to occupy only a few hundred square miles 
of territory, and the efforts to supress it, though miser¬ 
ably irresolute, have served to restrain its depreda¬ 
tions. There seems, however, to be a certain and very 
grave danger that when it becomes firmly implanted 
in the forests its assaults will be practicably irresistible. 
It is in the power of this creature, that a touch will 
slay, by its numbers to endanger our culture. This 
it will certainly do if its increase is not in some way 
arrested. 

In general, we may trust to the arrest of the multi¬ 
plication of any species of insect developing in its 
ancient associations with other life to the development 
;of some inimical insect or some of the mould-breeding 
forms of life competent to destroy it. For a few years 
these plagues may increase after the manner of the 
army worm until their devastations are startling, then 
some ichneumon fly, which has the habit of laying its 
eggs in their grubs, avails itself of the extended oppor- 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 197 

tunity and becomes in turn so plentiful that it destroys 
the host. But when, as in the case of the Gypsy 
Moth, the pest is an invader from another host and 
does not have to meet enemies trained for combat 
with it, the danger of its ravages is vastly enhanced. 
It is likely to be long before species competent to re¬ 
strain them are brought to efficiency, and in the mean¬ 
time the destruction goes on. 

As before noted, the organic hosts are generally so 
well organized that their closed ranks usually defy the 
efforts of would-be invaders of their realm. It com¬ 
monly requires the assistance of man, intentionally or 
unintentionally given, to effect the naturalization of 
a foreign form. Thus none of our weeds from the old 
world would have had a chance to obtain a foothold in 
this country, save for the fact that they have entered 
by the ways of commerce and have been first implanted 
on our cultivated fields. From that lodgment and nur¬ 
sery they can have a chance to spread to the less hospit¬ 
able wildernesses. A good example of how this works 
in insects is again well illustrated by the history of the 
Gypsy Moth in America. This insect has the habit of 
laying its eggs whenever it finds a chance to deposit 
them; where the creatures abound they are very often 
found on timber, furniture, casks, etc., so that it may be 
assumed as certain that for centuries they have been 
plentifully imported into this country. We have to 
believe that in thousands of instances these pests have 
hatched and the young had the chance to develop, but 
in no case did the species establish itself until in the 


Man and the Earth 


198 

latter part of the last century, when some of the kind 
were brought to eastern Massachusetts for purposes 
of experiment and reared in cages: by accident a con¬ 
siderable number of them in the grown state were re¬ 
leased, and thereby the implantation was effected. 

We see by the facts above noted that man’s relation 
to the organic life about him will in part consist in 
two series of actions: in the suppression of the crea¬ 
tures noxious to him because of their assault on his 
health or comfort, and in the restriction of the wan¬ 
derings of species which are kept in control in their 
native realms but become weeds when they are im¬ 
planted elsewhere. Another part of his endeavors 
should go to the limitation of his destructive work 
within the narrowest possible bounds, so that the body 
of life of which he is to be the master shall suffer as 
little as may be from his control. That it is inevitably 
to suffer much from his innovations has to be accepted 
as the price to be paid for the humanization of the 
earth, a process which is but at its beginning and is to 
go on until the quality of the sphere is to be vastly 
changed. But the measure of the alteration and its 
essential results are for his determination, and their 
effect will be in large measure to determine his station. 

It is evident that so far as the land-life is concerned 
the increase of numbers of mankind will inevitably break 
up many of the ancient organic hosts. The creatures of 
the sea, except those that afford food, are not likely to 
be disturbed, but with all the serviceable land occu¬ 
pied by the few plants and animals that are of use to 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 199 

civilization, and with the forests that remain after this 
selection devoted to the growth of those trees only that 
have value as timber, there will remain but the deserts 
and the untillable fields of high latitude where there 
will be a chance for nature to be maintained. Europe 
is already near to this state of complete subjugation: it 
seems pretty certain that in another century its wilder¬ 
nesses will all have disappeared. Not long after, the 
same conditions of utter domestication will come upon 
the fields of our own continent, and soon thereafter, 
even in the sense of human time, all the lands will be 
brought to the same state. It is, therefore, not too 
early to consider what losses this change will entail and 
what we of our time should do to minimize them. 

First, we shall note that, manage the situation as best 
we may, this humanizing of the earth will necessarily 
entail a great loss of its organic species, for while only 
a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, kinds, need 
be sacrificed for the betterment of man’s estate, a host 
will pass away because of the general disturbance 
which his civilized life brings about. It may be said 
that in the history of the earth the passing away of 
species is as common an event as the death of their 
individuals in our own times, and that human interfer¬ 
ence will but add a few score thousand to the hundreds 
of millions that have departed in their time. Yet we 
have to remember that this life of the earth is the rec¬ 
ord of the greatest work of the world and that, pre¬ 
cious as it is to the science of to-day, it is to be vastly 
more so to the science of the time to come. Each of 


200 


Man and the Earth 

these kinds we destroy is absolutely irreplaceable; no 
record we can make of it will be satisfactory to the 
learning of a thousand years hence. When a species 
dies it goes forever; for its like will never come into 
existence again. Moreover, we have to consider that, 
in the lame and impotent fragments of Nature that 
man is to leave, the processes that make new forms of 
wild land-life are in general to lapse, so that the places 
of those to be swept away are not likely to be filled. 
The question to which we are led by the points above 
noted is as to the groups of wild animals and plants 
which should be especially cared for, and the means 
by which they may most effectively be preserved. 

While we cannot clearly foresee what animals will be 
most important to the science of future centuries, cer¬ 
tain points of their interest we may fairly conjecture. 
We may presume that they will need to have types or 
examples of each group retained and, above all, those 
animals which belong to the more intelligent species: 
for the questions of mind in the lower creatures, inter¬ 
esting as they are to us, are to be far more so to our 
successors, who will be better able to approach the prob¬ 
lems of psychology. We can see clearly enough that 
they have a right to demand from us the utmost care 
in preserving those forms that, even with our limited 
view, are clearly enough seen to be of singular psycho¬ 
logic value. 

Leaving out of view the marine species where the 
advance of man is not likely to have much disturbing 
effect, and those in which we discern nothing of ex- 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 201 

traordinary importance, we still find very many groups 
that demand protection. Among the invertebrates 
there are no species below the grade of the insects that 
are in danger of passing away because of man’s action, 
but in that class there are sundry forms of remark¬ 
able mental quality that are likely to be exterminated 
before they have told their story to the students of the 
future. These are limited to those groups in which 
there are few kinds that need to be extirpated because 
of the damage they do. These groups are the ants, the 
bees, and the termites. In them we find the highest 
development of that form of mental action we term 
instinct. In the ants there are probably some hundreds 
of social species that show in a great variety of peculiar 
accomplishments the development of instincts. The 
same is the case in the groups of bees and wasps where 
the species, if less limited, are even richer in variety of 
mental actions. In these series of the hymenoptera 
there are few species in any measure harmful to man, 
while on the whole they afford the richest and most 
varied conditions of mentality existing in the inver¬ 
tebrates. The termites, commonly reckoned with the 
ants, but belonging to a very different order of insects, 
are a small and peculiarly interesting group: though 
occasionally harmful to man, they are not likely to be 
exterminated by him. As a whole, the insects most 
important to the psychologist are not likely to be 
exterminated or, if in danger of passing away, the 
passage will not come about for many centuries. 

It is in the invertebrates above the level of the fishes 


202 


Man and the Earth 


that all the great losses arising from the domestication 
of the earth are to be expected. In the reptiles and 
batrachians, the lower classes of the type, the groups 
are already far advanced in their decline from the rich¬ 
ness of their development in the middle age of organic 
history: there is little among them to preserve that 
seems specially important from the point of view of 
psychology. They may well be left to their chance of 
survival, good for a long time to come, except in the 
case of the larger saurians, the kindred of the croco¬ 
diles, and the more venomous serpents. The hum¬ 
bler and harmless forms are pretty sure to keep their 
place beside man. 

It is otherwise with the superior classes of the verte¬ 
brates, the mammals and the birds. In these groups the 
species are generally so active in their habits and so 
entangled in their environment that any considerable 
change in the conditions of their life is likely to lead, 
as it has in many instances led, to their speedy de¬ 
struction. Among the birds it is probable that a dozen 
species have been extirpated by man within a thou¬ 
sand years, and many others are on the verge of ex¬ 
tinction. Some of these were recently most abundant. 
Thus the passenger pigeon, which the present writer 
remembers only about half a century ago as the 
most numerous land-vertebrate of this or perhaps any 
other continent, is now a rare bird not readily to be 
found in any part of the field where it then super- 
abounded. Another instance from the same field is 
afforded by a species of parrot of the kind known as 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 203 

paroquets, which when Kentucky was first settled 
ranged as far north as the Ohio river. This interest¬ 
ing form has now been driven to the far South: the 
species is perhaps lost. In every part of the world the 
bird life appears to be far more disturbed by the ad¬ 
vance of civilization than that of any other class. 
There are scores if not hundreds of species which are 
on the verge of extinction. It is indeed probable that, 
except for peculiar care, the most of those forms, which 
do not in a way adopt man and his works in the manner 
of the British sparrow, will be swept from the earth. 
This fate is particularly likely to overtake the migra¬ 
tory species, for in their wanderings they are exposed 
to a great variety of environing conditions, all of which 
are likely to be changed by the alterations that man 
is to make. It behooves us to take especial care of 
these creatures, for they are in many ways the noblest 
products of life. 

It is in the mammalia that we find the species which 
the students of the future will most desire to explore, 
for they are our nearest kindred and from them we 
learn the most as to the history of our own minds. Of 
the several thousand kinds of wild, suck-giving ani¬ 
mals, none but a few score of the smaller sort, and some 
of the marine species which do not resort to the shores, 
will be safely housed when the earth is completely sub¬ 
jugated, save they be kept in selected wildernesses pro¬ 
tected from the depredations of the monumental 
slayer. It is not too much to say that nearly all the 
larger forms already have been brought to the danger 


204 Man and the Earth 

line, and that the greater number of them will, in one 
or two hundred years if they be not well cared for, 
utterly disappear. Within fifty years, several of the 
large mammals of Africa and America have been exter¬ 
minated or brought so near to extinction that their 
end is certain. 

It is not likely that any practicable measure of care 
will serve to protect the whole of our kindred mamma¬ 
lian species from death. The larger carnivora, the lion, 
tiger, etc., are too inconvenient to be spared. Certain 
of the herbivora, such as the African buffalo, are too 
ineradicably fierce to submit to the domestication of 
preserves. Of these unsavable forms there are not 
many; perhaps not more than a twentieth part of the 
whole number are beyond salvation. The remainder 
can be preserved, provided their master is willing to 
be a providence to them. Some of these, perhaps thirty 
species, need speedy care; the most can wait for a cen¬ 
tury or so before they are in imminent danger of ex¬ 
tinction. On the whole the herbivorous mammals of 
Africa are the most endangered of all their kindred. 
That continent, by far the richest in large species of the 
class, remained until the last century practically un¬ 
trodden by the sportsman. The human assault on the 
life of this land was made for food, or, in the case of 
the elephant and the hippopotamus, for ivory, and 
with ineffective arms; now the land is the favorite 
range of that mighty beast, the big-game hunter, who, 
with tools vastly more effective than the native’s spear 
or the flint-lock gun, kills not for profit but as a dog in 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 205 

a sheepfold for the mere love of killing. The African 
elephant, several of the antelopes of that country, and 
other very interesting species have been brought to 
the verge of extinction. In the opinion of those com¬ 
petent to judge, certain forms plentiful a hundred years 
ago have already passed away. The Indian elephant, 
because of his large place as a domesticated beast, 
although he does not breed freely in captivity, is ap¬ 
parently safe from extinction until supplanted by some 
kind of engine, but his African kinsman being much 
less domesticable, hardly fit, indeed, for the service of 
man, is doomed to certain and speedy extinction unless 
sedulously guarded from the sportsman; like most 
other large herbivora, it cannot maintain itself as a 
solitary paired form: it needs the conditions of the 
herd for its survival. As soon as it becomes rare it 
will speedily pass away. 

On many accounts the elephants are likely to prove 
the most interesting of the lower mammalia to the 
psychologists of the centuries to come. They belong 
to a branch from the stem whence man came, that 
separated from that main stem at an early stage of 
its history and has departed further than almost any 
other of the herbivora. The most of these aberrant 
groups, such as the whales, the bats, the armadillos, 
etc., have low-grade mental powers, but the elephants, 
for reasons which cannot here be discussed, reasons 
still doubtful, are mentally the ablest and most human¬ 
like of all the brutes, with the possible exception of the 
anthropoid apes. Those apes have indeed the brutal 


20 6 


Man and the Earth 


qualities of man in startling perfection, but the ele¬ 
phants, at least those of the Asiatic group, share with 
us many of the better human attributes as do no other 
of the lower mammalian species. It is a most inter¬ 
esting question in the history of mind how these crea¬ 
tures came by their intellectual, and we may fairly add 
their moral, capacities. As the nearest of our spiritual 
kinsmen except the domesticated dogs, they demand our 
care; they should have it also for their scientific value. 
From this point of view the African species is needed 
for comparison with its diverse Asiatic kinsman. 

From the point of view of the natural history of 
man, of which we yet know very little, it is particularly 
important that all those species which lie near the path 
through which he came from the lower life should be 
preserved for future enquiry. It is unhappily certain 
that there is no infra-human species or genus now exist¬ 
ing through which we can trace our descent. Yet the 
gorilla is a near collateral, so near, indeed, that it may 
fairly be claimed that he is in the same family as man, 
or even that as animals are usually classified in the same 
sub-family or tribe. It is likely enough that he is as 
near to us in the genealogical tree as is the sheep to the 
goat, the lion to the tiger, or the bison to the buffalo. 
So, too, with all the creatures commonly termed apes; 
they lie about the place of the parent stem of our life, 
representing in a hundred or so living examples the 
marvellous history of that age-long up-climbing that 
brought, in the end, our kind. The greatest of all 
science problems is this of the coming of man; so far 


The Future of Nature upon the Earth 207 

as we shall solve it the work will have to be done from 
the study of the life nearest to the path on which he 
won his way. If these monuments be destroyed before 
they are surely interpreted the riddle may never be 
read. 

It is always difficult to foresee the needs of the 
generations to come, and nowhere more so than in the 
field — we may indeed say the wide realm — of en¬ 
quiry; yet it is safe to anticipate the needs of handing 
on to our successors all we can of our and their heri¬ 
tage of the earth as little impaired as we can contrive 
it to be. We may be sure that they will more readily 
pardon the waste we may make of its physical resources, 
its coal and ores, or even of the precious soil, than any 
unnecessary or avoidable destruction of its organic 
species. They will require these creatures not only for 
the advance of knowledge in general, but for much they 
have to learn concerning the safety and development 
of the mind and body of mankind. It is, for instance, 
evident that, in studies yet to be made as to the nature 
and modes of prevention of human diseases, many 
species of animals are to contribute largely to knowl¬ 
edge as to their nature as well as to the means of 
prevention. Two out of the limited number of our 
domesticated animals, by their physiological charac¬ 
teristics, now preserve us from two of the most fatal 
maladies. The cow has by the method of vaccina¬ 
tion effectively relieved us of small-pox, and the horse 
is the only available creature for producing the anti¬ 
toxin of diphtheria. Thus we see that, with the next 


208 


Man and the Earth 

beast swept away, there may go the possibilities of 
help to life as well as to learning. 

In another chapter some of the ways in which we 
and our heritors may best deal with this difficult prob¬ 
lem of making over the surface of the earth with the 
least possible destruction of its indigenous life will be 
noted. The arrangements to attain this end cannot be 
made at once, they must be gradually developed, as re¬ 
quired by the advancing needs. What is, however, 
needed at once is a sense of the situation, a clearing 
away of the primitive childish notion that the mar¬ 
vellous life of this world is fitly to be taken as a toy 
for man, to be carelessly rent away with his plough, or 
slain for his diversion. The establishment of a truly 
civilized state of mind, as regards man’s duty by those 
creatures of all degree who share life with him, is the 
necessary foundation for such conduct as will keep our 
race and time from shame in the age to come. 


XII 

THE LAST OF EARTH AND MAN 

I N the previous chapters it has been more than once 
remarked that the earth is still in its youth and 
that the ages that it is to endure are likely to be 
as long as those which it has passed through since it 
came to bear its precious burthen of life. The evidence 
of this essential vigor is to be found in the fact that 
the two sources of energy, the sun and the under¬ 
ground depths, whence are derived all the processes 
of the sphere, are yet in the full tide of action and show 
no signs of exhaustion. Certain physicists, reckon¬ 
ing the sun’s heat as due altogether to the falling in 
of its elements toward its gravitative centre and the 
consequent expulsion of its heat, have reckoned that 
the supply would be exhausted in from four to 
twenty million years. In this computation they 
have neglected to take into account the fact that as 
the sun grows smaller it grows hotter, which would 
greatly prolong the heat out-giving process. More¬ 
over the discovery that some elements are radio-active, 
giving out vast stores of energy acquired, we know not 
how, has made an end of all reckonings as to the origin 
or the endurance of the heat in the celestial spheres. If 
14 


210 


Man and the Earth 

the sun has only a ten-thousandth part of its mass of 
radium, there is no limit to be assigned to its endur¬ 
ance as a vivifying centre of heat, by any computation 
we yet can make. 

While the trifling part of the heat lost by the sun 
that falls upon the earth is the source of all its atmos¬ 
pheric movements and of organic life, that from its 
depths is necessary to keep the surface in the condition 
of mingled land and sea. The reason for this is sim¬ 
ple, at least in its general nature. By losing heat the 
earth shrinks; as the loss of heat is from the depths, 
where a high temperature still exists, the shrinkage 
mainly takes place there and not to any considerable 
extent in the relatively cool outer parts of the sphere; 
hence this outer part of the sphere has to wrinkle in 
order to fit the lessened centre. This, though too 
briefly stated, is the cause of the upward wrinklings 
of the crust which form the continents, and of the 
downward that hold the seas. There are sundry other 
actions that come in to determine the mode in which 
this work is done, but the main point is that these 
movements are necessary in order to keep the dry land 
from being reduced to the level of the ocean. Should 
the earth’s interior cease to lose heat, this uplifting 
process would come to an end, and the lands be worn 
down to the level of the waves. This would take time, 
for the average rate of the downwearing is somewhere 
about a foot in four thousand years; but it would 
be a matter of only a few geological periods before 
the continental areas would be brought to the condi- 


211 


The Last of Earth and Man 

tion of low, ill-drained plain lands, and a large part 
of their area would disappear beneath the sea. 

What we know of the internal heat of the earth 
leads by lines of fact and argument, too long to be 
discussed in this writing, to the conclusion that the 
store of it is great enough by its loss to keep up the 
continent-building process for a vast period, probably 
for far longer than all the time which has elapsed 
since life came upon the earth. The amount of the loss 
is not great, being no more than would bring about 
a shortening of the earth’s diameter by a foot or two 
in a thousand years. Yet this is enough to continue the 
upgrowth of the great lands at a rate sufficient to 
compensate for the down-wearing, as well as to main¬ 
tain, in a way about to be described, the revolution of 
the earth on its axis, despite the fact that the tides 
produced by the moon and sun are ever and vigorously 
at work to arrest this movement. This curious tidal 
action has so large a place in the history of the celes¬ 
tial spheres, and so important a bearing on the future 
of the earth as a theatre of life, that we should see it, 
so far as concerns our enquiry, as clearly as we can. 

The general nature of tides, so far as those of the 
ocean go, is a matter of popular knowledge. We all 
know that the gravitative pull of the moon or sun on 
the earth is in accordance with Newton’s law directly 
as the square of the distance of the matter that does 
the pulling; hence the water on the face toward the 
attracting body is lifted higher than that on the sides 
of the earth, and that on the face opposite the attrac- 


212 


Man and the Earth 


tion is less lifted than the mass of the sphere. So that 
there are two tides formed, one because the ocean is 
pulled away from the planet, and the other because 
the earth, as a whole, is drawn away from the remoter 
waters. This is an over-simple explanation, but it is 
all that needed brevity will allow. 

It has long been recognized that the earth in its 
daily rotation is ever swinging against the tidal waves, 
pushing them aside with its lands much as a ship 
breaks the wind-made waves. The result is necessarily 
somewhat to slow the turning movement of the sphere. 
The action is like that of a brake on a fly-wheel which 
continually diminishes the power that keeps it in mo¬ 
tion. There is no means by which this energy of turn¬ 
ing can effectively be replaced. It is a part of the 
original movement impressed on the earth at the time 
when the nebulous mass became separated from the 
other parts of the solar system: any subtraction, 
however small, necessarily slows and presently prevents 
the movement. When a man climbs a westward- 
sloping hill, he applies an infinitesimal amount of 
energy to accelerating the earth’s movement; as he 
descends the eastern slope he does like immeasurably 
small work in speeding the machine. The tides are 
giants in this treadmill, and computation shows that 
in the course of a few thousand years they should mark 
their action by the shortening of the day by a second or 
two. But now come the astronomers, with fair proof 
drawn from evidence as to the time of occurrence of 
ancient eclipses, showing that the day cannot have 


The Last of Earth and Man 213 

shortened by as much as a second for all that tidal 
friction should have brought a vastly greater result 
about. The only discernible way out of this tangle 
is through the following considerations: 

When a sphere is whirling with a certain fixed 
momentum, as in the case of the earth, as we lessen 
its diameter we increase the speed of the rotation. 
A familiar and fairly good instance of this may be had 
by swinging a weight attached by a string so that the 
cord winds around the finger; as the line shortens 
the turns are made in less and less time. Effectively 
the same principle is applied to the steam governor. 
We thus see that if the oceanic tides tend to diminish 
the rotation of the earth, as they surely do, then there 
is reason to believe that this action is neutralized by 
the shrinking of the sphere. This action of the oceanic 
tides is only a small part of the tidal work which has 
profoundly affected the celestial spheres and is con¬ 
tinually acting, so long as they are not rigid to the 
gravitative pulls of other bodies. The wide-ranging 
effect of this action has recently been made known to 
us by George Darwin, and has, as yet, not entered 
into the field of popular science. It may, therefore, 
be worth while briefly to set it forth. 

The effect of the tidal action of two spheres, while 
they are in the fluid or plastic state in which the tides 
can by their attraction cause the shapes of their masses 
to alter, is to send them further apart. Thus when the 
moon was set off from the earth, both spheres were, 
doubtless, much nearer to each other than they are 


214 Man and the Earth 

at present. They may have been almost in contact, but 
at that time both of them had such a mobility of their 
particles that each produced great tides in the other. 
The effect of the interaction of these tidal protuber¬ 
ances was to push the bodies apart. The way in which 
the process is effected cannot be set forth, save in 
rather recondite mathematical form, or by complicated 
diagrams. Hence it may better go as a bald statement, 
with the assurance that the result is unquestionable. 

So long as the earth and moon remained sufficiently 
fluid to allow their whole spheres to be tidalized, the 
constant, slight, but efficient strain, due to the action, 
pulled them away from one another. When they be¬ 
come so far solidified that the tides ceased to deform 
their spheres, they ceased to work apart. The rela¬ 
tively slight uplifts of the oceans still have effect in this 
way, but it is so small that we cannot expect to trace 
it. In the case of nebulous masses which are passing 
into the state of solar systems where there are for a 
time fluid spheres, this sundering action of the tides 
has much to do with their shaping. This is particu¬ 
larly the case with those most puzzling wonders of the 
spaces, the double stars of the type when two neigh¬ 
boring suns revolve about their common centre of 
gravity. Because of the heat which their shining 
indicates, we have to believe that they are fluid enough 
to have vast tides which, in the manner above sug¬ 
gested, are driving them apart until they become 
separated, it may be, further than the most remote 
planet from the sun. 


( The Last of Earth and Man 215 

Coming back to the matter of the continuance of 
the earth in something like its present condition, we 
see that all the discernible facts point to the conclusion 
that, so far as the conditions of the ancient relations 
between the heat of the sun and of the earth’s interior, 
the important elements in the mechanism, are con¬ 
cerned, there is no reason why a hundred million fair 
years of life may not be before this planet. As for 
the tidal effect, the earth has passed the time when 
the solar tides can push it further into space, for it is, 
as we know, too rigid to yield to that action except 
in the slight movement of the oceans. The question 
arises: Are there any other foreseeable accidents that 
may mar this fair prospect ? There are certain of these 
which some pessimistic naturalists have looked for¬ 
ward to as possible and even probable sources of calam¬ 
ity. These we will now consider. 

First of all, there are suggestions that the earth’s 
atmosphere is in process of being deprived of the most 
important of its constituents, oxygen and carbon di¬ 
oxide (CO 2 ), by the daily routine of its organic life. 
This is undoubtedly true as regards both of these sub¬ 
stances. They are rapidly passing into the solid crust; 
each thousand years takes of them a notable amount 
from the air. In the case of the carbon, the vast 
withdrawal in forming limestones, coals, and coral 
beds is probably compensated in part by the emana¬ 
tions of its gas from volcanoes, and in part by the 
entrance of carbon meteorites into the atmosphere 
from the celestial spaces, where they are burned or 


u 6 Man and the Earth 

oxidized because of the high temperature the friction 
against the air brings about. In the case of the oxygen, 
the problem is not yet clear. We see no source whence 
the vast withdrawal due to the geologic processes can 
be made good. That it is in some way fed into the 
air, perhaps in the atomic state from the spaces, is 
made effectively certain by the following evidence: 

We know that the atmosphere has not changed much 
in mass during the geologic periods from the Silurian 
to the present day, for since that time there has been 
no great alteration in the general character of the 
earth’s climate. If the atmosphere were greatly in¬ 
creased in quantity, the effect would be proportion¬ 
ately to augment the temperature of the surface. A 
gain of one-tenth in the mass of the atmosphere so 
caused would probably change the heat at the sea level 
by not less than 50° Fahrenheit. Such an increase 
would, it is true, be resisted by the evaporation due 
to the gain in temperature, and the consequent develop¬ 
ment of a permanent cloud-wrap, impenetrable to the 
direct rays of the sun — a veil something like that 
which shrouds the planet Jupiter — but the effect would 
be to disturb the admirable balance to which we owe 
the fitness of sea and land to nurture life. The fact 
that, since the Cambrian period, we have had the nor¬ 
mal succession of glacial periods and those of no gla¬ 
ciation down to about the same parallels of latitude 
is fair proof that the mass of air has not been greater 
than it is at present. A like train of reasoning leads 
us to believe that the mass of air has not been very 


The Last of Earth and Man 217 

much less than it now is since early geologic times. 
For if that mass had ever been reduced by as much as 
one-fourth, the result would have been a devastating 
cold, such as we encounter at the height of say twenty- 
five thousand feet above the sea level, where no living 
forms whatever can abide. In a word, the persistence 
of the air in vitalizing quantity seems to be well proved 
by the past of a hundred million years or more, so 
that we may reasonably assume that it is not likely 
to be disturbed for an indefinite time in the future. 

As for the chemical constitution of the atmosphere, 
the evidence goes to show that it has been as constant 
as this mass. Experiments on a variety of animals 
and plants show that they do not tolerate any consid¬ 
erable variation in the quantity of the carbon dioxide 
or the oxygen it contains. A slight increase in the 
proportion of either of these substances held in the air 
is at once destructive to animals or plants alike. Nor 
can we fairly assume that in other ages these forms 
were more tolerant to the increase of these necessary 
materials. The fact seems clear that organic life began 
with an adjustment to the atmosphere substantially 
as it now exists, and throughout its history has found 
these conditions unchanged. Thus, so far as the 
mechanism of the earth itself is concerned, we may con¬ 
fidently reckon that the machinery is marvellously well 
fitted to keep on as it is for a vast time to come. 

Turning now to the external dangers of the earth, 
let us see what chance there is of catastrophes due to 
events in the stiller spaces that might make an end 


218 


Man and the Earth 

of the ancient terrestrial order, or so far damage it 
as to make an end of its rational period — the reign 
of man. There is an interesting group of conjec¬ 
tures as to variations in the temperature of space which 
deserves brief mention. These are, in effect, that the 
stars in the heavens, the heat-radiating suns, are vari¬ 
ously grouped so that there are realms of warmth 
where they abound, and others of cold where they are 
remote from each other. Now as our solar system is 
journeying at a speed of something like twenty miles 
a second toward the constellation of Hercules, may 
it not be that the earth will come to be in hotter and 
colder places during its voyage? The answer to this 
once much-discussed suggestion is that the share of 
heat given by the stars is presumably equal to the 
light they send, so that it would require that these 
radiant orbs should be very numerous and inconceiv¬ 
ably near before they would materially affect the tem¬ 
perature of space. Moreover, though we are flying at 
stellar speed, it will require tens of millions of years 
to bring about any considerable change in our relation 
to the positions of other suns. Therefore, though this 
may be in a slight way a true cause of climatal change, 
it is too remote for us to reckon upon. It is safe to say 
that for the duration of man he will know skies like 
those of this time. 

There is the old popular notion that a comet would 
in the end bring the finish to the earth; but now we 
know these bodies as trifling affairs: so far as danger 
is concerned not worth taking into account. It is 


The Last of Earth and Man 219 

doubtful if any of them are much more than clouds of 
scattered particles, shreds, it may be, of the ancient 
nebulous matter, from which solar systems are made, 
which did not get embodied in the process of aggre¬ 
gation. Should one come in contact with the earth, 
an accident almost infinitely improbable, the effect 
would probably be a startling meteoric display and 
nothing more. There is, however, another group of 
bodies: the meteoric bodies composed in part of iron 
and in part of stony materials which give enough token 
of danger to warrant scrutiny. The facts about these 
materials are as follows: 

Each year there are likely to be a number of me¬ 
teoric falls, the masses varying in size from the small¬ 
est bits that can be identified to those weighing a ton 
or more. None of the greater masses have been seen 
on their way to the earth, but as these largest are 
of the iron group and, in most instances, easily dis¬ 
criminated from any earth materials by very evident 
features, there is no doubt that they are of celestial 
origin. So far as these bits that are known to have 
fallen on the earth are concerned, they are of no im¬ 
portance in its economy. Up to this day there is no 
well-attested instance in which they have in any way 
interfered with man. If we knew that we had learned 
the whole of the story we might well turn over the 
meteoric problem to those who are trying to solve the 
scientific aspects of it. There is, however, the chance 
that it may have import in relation to the future of 
the earth for the reason that, while as yet we have 


220 


Man and the Earth 


found none of these visitants of more than a few 
tons’ weight, it is at first sight not inconceivable that 
one should collide with us of vastly greater size, say 
a mile in diameter. What will be the effect of such 
a contact? 

We readily see that a meteoric mass weighing as 
much as a ton coming upon the earth at a speed of 
about twenty miles a second — perhaps twice that speed 
if the earth is swinging toward it — applies a vast 
amount of energy to the planet before it comes to rest. 
But by far the greater part of this is spent in rending 
its way through the thirty miles or so of air it trav¬ 
erses, so that when it strikes the ground it seems 
never to have the velocity of a modern cannon shot, 
as is shown by their slight penetration of the earth. 
If, on the other hand, the body was a mile or more 
in diameter the consequences would be very serious. 
Only a small part of the energy would be spent in the 
air, and the heat engendered in air and on earth as well 
as the shock would be sufficient to bring about the 
destruction of life over a wide area. The damage 
would increase with the diameter of the body in a high 
ratio, so that such a collision with a mass twenty miles 
in diameter would pretty surely be fatal to all the 
land-life of the earth. 

Fortunately for our peace of mind, there seems 
good reason for believing that bodies of the group to 
which meteorites belong are not likely very much to 
exceed in size those we have found on the earth, and 
this for the reason that these bits have not been formed 


221 


The Last of Earth and Man 

in the celestial spaces, but are evidently fragments cast 
forth from a sphere in the volcanic manner. This is 
proved by the fact that they are perfectly crystallized in 
a way that shows them to have been parts of a large 
mass. Their shapes indicate that the mass to which 
they belonged was subjected to strains that developed 
joints and faults. Their rent faces tell that they have 
passed from the parent body by explosive action. All 
these facts justify the hypothesis that they have been 
thrown out from volcanoes. Now all that we know of 
such explosions indicates that masses more than one 
or two thousand cubic feet in volume are not cast forth, 
the reason for this being that the violent action of the 
ejective process causes the rock to be broken into bits 
along its joint faces, or through the mass if joints be 
lacking. We may, therefore, presume that so far as 
these falls of meteoric stones is concerned, there is 
little risk that we shall encounter any large enough 
to bring any damage to the earth. 

Besides the meteorites, there is another group of 
bodies in our solar system from which there may be 
danger of collisions. These are the bodies, such as 
the asteroids, which inhabit the space between Mars 
and Jupiter, masses of relatively small size, apparently 
varying from a hundred to a thousand miles in diam¬ 
eter, and somewhat plentifully sown through a wide 
field. It is likely that they exist there by the thousand, 
and it is not improbable that very many of them are 
much smaller than those that have been detected. One 
body of this class, known as Vulcan, lies between our 


222 


Man and the Earth 

earth and Mars. It seems to be of rather irregular 
shape, and, what is more important, to be treading a 
very irregular orbit. As to the origin of these odd 
bits of matter, we are as yet in the darkness. They 
are too large to have been ejected by volcanic action, 
and seemingly too small to have run the normal course 
of a sphere from the primitive nebulous matter. It 
has been conjectured that they are the result of an 
explosion of a planet which hurled the mass into frag¬ 
ments, but their distribution in the field they occupy is 
against this view. Moreover, we cannot as yet conceive 
the action of any force that would so rend a sphere to 
bits. While the theory of the formation of these singu¬ 
lar bodies is interesting enough, we are at the moment 
concerned with the question whether there may not 
be many of the same group too small to have been 
detected by the telescope which may, in course of time, 
collide with the earth. 

As for likelihood of danger from stony planetoids 
or bolids colliding with the earth, we have two sets 
of evidence drawn from the physical history of the 
moon and the earth. In the case of the moon, we have 
a sphere the surface of which is very ancient. There 
is reason to believe that it antedates the solidification 
of the earth’s crust, and so, most likely, is some hun¬ 
dreds of millions years old. As the present writer has 
elsewhere noted, the visible part of the moon shows 
in the so-called seas what appears to be proof that there 
have been collisions with falling bodies large enough 
to melt the lunar rocks over areas some tens of thou- 


The Last of Earth and Man 223 

sands of miles in diameter. These collisions took place 
at a very ancient time after the greater part, but not all, 
of the heat of that sphere had passed from it. There 
is no basis for a reckoning as to the time of occurrence 
of these accidents, but for the reason that the moon, 
through a relatively small sphere, still retained, at the 
time of these accidents, a share of its heat, it is reasona¬ 
ble to suppose that the earth had not yet cooled down to 
the point when organic life was established upon it. 
This would establish the time of the lunar falls as at 
least a hundred million years ago, perhaps very much 
more remote. 

The fall of large bodies on the moon, if it occurred, 
and the facts well warrant the supposition that it did, 
appears to have come about at or near the same time 
and, as we have noted, at a very remote period. If 
such then took place on the earth as a part of the same 
accident, it probably happened before our sphere had 
passed out of the universally molten state. Nothing 
that can be regarded as evidence of such a catastrophe 
has been found by geologists. If a record of it had 
been written on the solid globe, it would probably be 
evident to this day in a vast area of igneous rocks of 
a uniform nature such as apparently exist in the so- 
called lunar seas. Moreover, the demonstrated con¬ 
tinuity of life on all the continents from an early stage 
of the earth’s development is proof that the delicate 
adjustment of its temperature has not been disturbed. 
The fall of a celestial mass sufficient to have formed the 
lava of the smallest “ sea ” on the moon would inevi- 


224 Man and the Earth 

tably have disturbed the organic order in a way that 
would appear in the geological record. 

Looking upon the problem of the earth’s organic 
future in the light of its past, a method of enquiry 
by far the safest, for it involves no hypotheses what¬ 
ever, we find great evidence that the conditions are 
such as to make a very long survival of the present 
conditions as certain as anything in this varied uni¬ 
verse can be. We may assume that for a future, 
probably as long as the geologically recorded past, 
the sphere will go onward through time and space, 
free to work out its problems of life, with no break 
in the succession due to accidents coming from within 
or without. Here is a free field for much in the way 
of deeds. Whereto are they to lead and what is to 
be the end of it all? It is a great field of action and 
a fair one for speculations, though as yet but little 
explored. 

The most important element in the future of man 
is the extent to which he may be able to obtain con¬ 
trol of the processes of his own body, those which 
determine health, longevity, and, above all, his in¬ 
heritances. In the chapter on the rational control of 
the earth the probabilities of such accomplishment are 
considered and the conclusion reached that there are 
large possibilities of gain in all these regards. The 
question arises as to the directions in which the quality 
of life may be advanced through these accessions of 
capacity to shape it. In this field there is room for 
unlimited conjecture, but little to guide the process. 


The Last of Earth and Man 225 

There are, however, certain features of this future 
which appear to be fairly determinable, and, though 
they are shadowy, not without interest to those who 
would forecast the future of mankind. 

It is with a pleasure not without an alloy of regret 
that we may confidently look forward to men who are 
to look back on ourselves, as we to our ^ancestors of the 
bone and cave age — not despisingly, as we look upon 
those troglodytes, for the man to come will have too 
large a sense of relations for that — yet with a judg¬ 
ment that we were far back in the night when we 
thought we dwelt in the day. We may be sure that 
they will take us largely and tenderly, these folk of 
mayhap a million years hence, for they will feel the 
unity of life, while we merely discern it and that only 
in part. It is in this sense of the common bond of all 
life that those who are to look upon us from afar will 
have their greatest enlargement. Knowledge they will 
have beyond the conception of our time, as ours is 
beyond that of the lowest of our kind; but it is in 
the extension of the sympathies that our kind is to 
make its largest gains. By this our successors are at 
once to go far from us and to come nearer. In that 
field the gain may well be such as to make a new 
species, a new order of man, parted from us as we 
from the lower brutes, yet including our little lives in 
its vast extension. 

There are many signs that show us the present won¬ 
derful expansion of the economic part of civilization 
which, by its magnitude of material achievements, hides 

15 


22 6 


Man and the Earth 


from us the more important changes and gains that are 
taking place in the higher realm of the sympathies. 
The first effect of this great modern movement was, in 
a measure, destructive to the emotional side of man that 
related to the so-called fine arts; we lost in part the 
ancient mode of expression of it through literature, 
sculpture, and painting. This loss seems to have been 
no more than the diversion of an ever-gathering stream 
into ways that led to an immediate rational sympathy 
with the fellow-man and the fellow-nature. In this 
field of action the only monuments are institutions and 
the states of mind they indicate These show clearly 
that within the last four centuries, since we began to 
emerge from medievalism, the gain in sympathy has, 
in the Aryan race, been greater than in all the pre¬ 
vious stages of its advance. Other races, for obvious 
reasons, show less of this movement, but it is evidently 
a part of a series in which all the civilizable groups 
of men are to share, leading in the end to the comple¬ 
tion of the evolution which began with the earliest 
organic form. 

We may fairly expect this sympathetic development 
of men along with the rational within a brief geologic 
time to bring our genus to an intellectual and spiritual 
control of life such as we can but faintly divine with 
our imagination. There is no reason to forecast the end 
of this new order until the sun goes out, or the under¬ 
earth ceases to renew the theatre of life. That, so far 
as we can reckon, may well be as remote in the future 
as the dawn of life is in the past. We seem to be in the 


The Last of Earth and Man 227 

middle of the term with the most of the great doing, 
and with that in the spiritual realm yet to be done. 
When the end comes we may be sure that it will not be 
in the vile Schopenhauer way — by the voluntary 
abandonment by man of his life as a thing of evil — 
but by a cheerful surrender of it in the conviction 
that a great work is done, and that it is a fit part in an 
infinite accomplishment. 

We may ask ourselves as to the last steps in the 
time when the earth and sun begin to wane in their 
activities and to verge slowly to the end. Will those 
far-off men elect to keep up the battle to the impera¬ 
tive finish, contending with the degradation that comes 
from shrunken lands or scant heat, or will they in their 
wisdom choose to pass out in their nobler state? To 
this we can give no other answer save that those en¬ 
larged semblances of ourselves will make their judg¬ 
ment from a high station and dutifully, as we should 
in our happier estate. 


XIII 


THE ATTITUDE OF MAN TO THE EARTH — 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 

T HOSE who have read the preceding pages of 
this book must have perceived that so far as 
the matter they contain has other purpose 
than to be interesting, that purpose is meant to awaken 
a sense of the nobility and dignity of the relation man 
bears to this wonderful planet and the duty that comes 
therefrom. In this closing chapter I propose to 
assemble certain of these considerations in an effort 
to show the need of another than the old way of look¬ 
ing at the world about us as a mere toy or, at most, a 
useful mechanism, and to consider the obligations 
which it lays upon us. 

There is a school of philosophers, like the most of 
such schools ancient and rather out of date, whose fol¬ 
lowers hold to the interesting notion that the universe 
is but an extension of the individual man: that all in 
the realm is but an enlargement of him who cognizes 
it — having its existence altogether from his apprecia¬ 
tion. Like many another philosophy, this of the solips- 


Summary and Conclusions 229 

ists (i. e., only himself-ists ), it is good to entertain its 
views at least for a time, because they serve, even if not 
strictly true, to enlarge our conceptions. As the natural¬ 
ist sees it, this paradoxical statement of man’s relation 
to the universe needs but a change of form to fit the 
facts better than any other theoretical interpretation. 
If we say that the universe is an extension of man 
because he has come forth from it and embodies in a 
way all in himself, we have a form of solipsism that 
suits the student of nature — apparently the new mode 
of phrasing reverses the tenet — but it retains the essen¬ 
tial point of the ingenious philosophy, for it acknowl¬ 
edges the identity of man and the realm in which he 
dwells. 

There is good reason to believe that the main idea 
embodied in the philosophy which regards the world 
as essentially kin to ourselves is to be that held by the 
men of the hereafter. The whole trend of the under¬ 
standing as to the relation of man to the realm leads 
to the conclusion that whatever else he may be, he is 
the sum of a series of actions linked with all that has 
gone on upon this earth. Already the more discern¬ 
ing see that our kind have come to the beginning of 
their mastery of this world by penetrating into its 
meanings, and further knowledge can only increase 
the clearness and sufficiency of this vision. We may 
assume that our successors will, generation by gener¬ 
ation, be more and more inspired by this understand¬ 
ing: that they will come to see the world as a wider 
aspect of themselves. 


Man and the Earth 


230 

If the above suggested view as to the trend of thought 
of men as to their relations with nature be true, then 
we have not long to wait until the care for the economi¬ 
cal resources of the earth which has been advocated in 
the first chapters of this book, and for which people are 
already prepared, will be merged in a larger care for 
the sphere as a part of man from which he has been 
alienated by ignorance, but with which he is to be rec¬ 
onciled by knowledge. Seeing, as he must, for it is 
written on earth and sky, the oneness of Nature and 
intelligence as its master, man is sure to go forward 
unto the higher life of understanding out of which will 
come a sense, of which we see barely the traces in our 
time, of his duty by the earth. At present, the concep¬ 
tion as to our place in the realm is so new, so confused 
with the ancient misunderstandings, that it is difficult 
to see how we can do the first part of our task by co¬ 
operating with the conditions which have made for 
the advance which has brought us to the gates of the 
new life. Certain directions for our endeavors are, 
however, plain. 

To bring men to an appreciation of their station as 
masters of the earth it is necessary that they be effect¬ 
ively taught the nature of that relation. This is, in¬ 
deed, the part of modern science, but we are as yet far 
from its accomplishment. So far as science is now 
passing to the body of the people, it is in the form of 
special, though elementary, knowledge of this or that 
group of the facts. Of such, men may have an endless 
amount and yet not be nearer to the understanding of 


Summary and Conclusions 231 

the important truth; the need is to have this truth 
taught as a gospel. It has to go to men with the quality 
of religion, by the way of imagination and the emo¬ 
tions with which it is conjoined. There is reason to 
hope that we are at the beginning of the 'process which 
is surely to require generations for its accomplishment. 
At best this enlargement will be slowly brought about 
and it cannot be expected immediately to affect the com¬ 
mon folk. Unless the world of men should become 
philosophers, we must look in the future as in the past 
for the leading spirits, the rare men, to be guides to 
the new dispensation, the masses following in the 
ancient dumb way — taking their light not directly 
from nature, but in the good old way, mediately 
through their prophets. 

Something may be done to hasten the growth of a 
better state of mind as to man’s relation to nature by a 
much-needed change in our methods of teaching 
science. We now present the realm to beginners as 
a group of fragments labelled astronomy, geology, 
chemistry, physics, and biology, each, as set forth, ap¬ 
pearing to him as a little world in itself, with its own 
separate life, having little to do with its neighbors. It 
is rare, indeed, in a very considerable experience with 
youths to find one who has gained any inkling as to the 
complete unity of nature. Seldom it is, even with those 
who attain mastery in some one of these learnings, that 
we find a true sense as to the absolute oneness of the 
realm, or the place of* man as the highest product of 
its work. This is the inevitable position of those whose 


232 Man and the Earth 

task it is to advance the frontiers of knowledge. The 
mass of their knowledge required to make way in any 
field is so great that little can be known of any other 
domain. But this situation of the investigator needs 
not be that of the ordinary man. Save for the merest 
trifle of knowledge which he gains by the simplest 
individual enquiries, he must take this nature on faith 
in his teachers. So far from trying to compass the 
learning of the smallest bit of the realm, he needs 
be limited to the little of it that will best serve to 
enlarge his understandings of the world as a part of 
himself. 

In the revision of our project concerning the share of 
natural science in our scheme of popular education — a 
revision long overdue and now sorely requiring action 
— we need begin by determining, first of all, what of 
its truths have cardinal value from the point of view of 
conduct; what of them, in a word, help to dutifulness 
by ennobling the conception of man’s place in nature. 
Other matters may be taught for other purposes, for. 
their purely intellectual values, or for their economic 
uses; but the great gain we are to have from the 
modern knowledge of the world is in the change of 
attitude it is to bring about: in the sense of kinship 
with the anciently alien realm and of duty by the great 
inheritance of life. To the making of this new spirit 
no great body of learning needs go; it will depend for 
its development far more on the way of approach than 
on the mass of the knowledge that is gained. So soon 
as men come to feel themselves as really the children of 


Summary and Conclusions 233 

the world, the tides of affection that instinctively tend 
toward it, but have been sorely hindered by ancient 
misunderstandings, will help in the good work, and 
give us souls reconciled to their great house and eager 
to help its order. 



INDEX 


r 


Adaptation of substances to de¬ 
sires, 42. 

^Esthetic sense, 174-182; in in¬ 
sects, 174; in birds, 174, 175; 
in mammalia below man, 175, 
176 ; in man, 176-182. 

Africa, irrigation in, 77, see Nile ; 
proportional part of, which will 
remain unchanged by man, 184; 
as a hunting-ground, 204. 

Agriculture, the true aim of a con¬ 
servative, 123. 

Alkali coating in arid lands, 72. 

Aluminum as a possible substitute 
for iron and copper, 58-61; cost 
of production, 60. 

Americans, sinful wasters of the 
land, 128. 

Animals, extermination of certain, 
2, 194; oceanic, in bulk, exceed- 
those of the earth, 141. 

Antelopes, of Africa, on verge of 
extinction, 205. 

Ants, 201. 

Apatite, 135. 

Apes, 206. 

Arkansas River, opportunity for ir¬ 
rigation in connection with, 81. 

Asia, opportunity for irrigation in, 

75 - 

Asteroids, 221. 

Atmosphere, the earth’s, 215-217. 

Australia, irrigation in, 78; no bog¬ 
making mosses in, 98; propor¬ 
tional part of, which will remain 
unchanged by man, 184. 


Bacteria, 191,194. 

Bays, as flooded river valleys, 91. 

Beauty, of the earth, 172-189; of 
flowers, 173 ; sense of, in insects, 
174; in vertebrates, 174; in mam¬ 
mals, 175; in man, 176-182; pre¬ 
servation of the earth’s, 184-188. 

Bees, 201. 

Birds, marine, 147; sense of beauty 
in, 175; man’s relation to, 202. 

Bison, North American, 193. 

Bogs, 87, 94; peat, 96 ; quaking, 
96; upland or climbing, 97. 

Carbon, in organic matter as a 
source of dynamic power, 31-41; 
process of formation, 33. 

Carbon dioxide in the earth’s at¬ 
mosphere, 215-217. 

Changes to come in the human 
period, 150-171. 

China, iron ore in, 55. 

Climate of the earth, changes of, 
in the past and in the future, 
161-166. 

Climbing bogs, 97. 

Coal, increase in demand for, 4, 6; 
process of formation, 34; distri¬ 
bution of, 35-37- 

Colorado River, opportunity for 
irrigation in connection with, 81. 

Comets, 218. 

Continents, changes in, 166-169; 
proportional parts of, which will 
remain unchanged by man, 183, 
184. 



Index 


236 

Copper, increase in consumption 
of, 3; of cardinal importance in 
civilization, 45; sources of sup¬ 
ply) 57 '> exhaustion of, 58. 

Cordilleras, irrigation of the desert 
section of, 81-83, I ^4* 

Cow, and vaccination, 207. 

Cranberry growing in drained 
swamps, 99. 

Cromwell, Oliver, 89. 

Darwin, George, 213. 

Deserts, 70-78; their aridity tem¬ 
porary, 70; character of the 
soil, 71, 113; alkali coating, 72; 
irrigation of, 73. 

Detritus, the critical point in 
man’s relation to the earth 
found in the coating of, 120; 
renewal of, 7, 121; its effect on 
life of the sea, 122; movement 
of, must be regulated, not stayed, 
10, 123. 

Disease tax, man’s future avoid¬ 
ance of, 158. 

Diseases, methods of prevention 
to be learned from animals, 207. 

Drainage, 17, 88-100. 

Dust, conveyed through the air, 
125. 

Earth, man’s use of its limited 
resources, vii; matter of statis¬ 
tics in regard to its resources, 
vii, viii; the exhaustion of 
its stores, 1-11; the question 
of the permanency of its condi¬ 
tions, 160-171; beauty of, 172- 
189; the future of nature upon, 
190-208; humanizing of the, 190, 
193-208; and man, the last of, 
209-227; still in its youth, 209, 
215, 217, 224; its internal heat, 
210, 211 ; and planetoids, 218- 


224; the attitude of man toward, 
228, 229. 

Earthenware, 45. 

Earthquakes, 170. 

Egypt, in the hands of the Eng¬ 
lish, 107-110, 117-119. 

Elephant, African, on verge of 
extinction, 205; intelligence of, 
205; should be preserved, 206. 

Energy, increasing the supply of 
dynamic, 20; source of, is the 
sun, 21. 

English, the, in Egypt, 107-110, 
117-119. 

Erosion of the earth’s surface, 
caused by rain, 8, 12 5-127; ex¬ 
cessive, 128. 

Eurasia, proportional part of, which 
will remain unchanged by man, 
184. 

Europe, irrigation in, 76. 

Everglades, the, of Florida, 186. 

Exhaustion of the stores of the 
earth, 1-11. 

Fellaheen, the, 118. 

Fertilization of soil, 131-137. 

Fishes, propagation of, 143; de¬ 
velopment of varieties in, 145; 
governmental study of, 146. 

Flowers, the beauty of, due to 
insects, 173. 

Folding, 87. 

Food, the sea as a source of supply 
of, 142; ways of increasing the 
amount derivable from the sea, 
142-146. 

Food supply, exhaustion of, 7-19; 
see Soil. 

Forests, protection of, 185. 

Fuel, increase in demand for, 4; 
fossil, as a source of dynamic 
power, 31-41; peat, 32; coal 
34, 35-37 i oil and gas, 35, 37; 



Index 


37; amount of, small and eva¬ 
nescent, 35. 

Gas, rock, 35; an evanescent 
store, 37. 

Geographic changes of the future, 
166-169. 

Glacial periods, 163-165. 

Gold, relative importance in civi¬ 
lization, 46, 61; obtained from 
sea-water, 62. 

Gorilla, 206. 

Government reservations, 184-188. 

Great Britain, redemption of 
swamps in, 88. 

Greeks, their lack of sensitiveness 
to the charm of form in the 
landscape, 179. 

Guano, 133. 

Gypsy Moth, the, 196, 197. 

Heat, of the sun and of the earth’s 
interior, 209-211. 

Holland, redemption of inundated 
land in, 89. 

Horse, produces anti-toxin of 
diphtheria, 207. 

Insects, 173, 174, 195. 

Iron, increase in consumption of, 
3; the prime metal of civiliza¬ 
tion, 46; where the ore is placed 
in the earth, 49; diffusion of, 
50-56; ore most plentiful in 
North America, 51 ; the passing 
of the iron age, 56. 

Iron pyrite, 66. 

Irrigation, 17, 69; method of the 
process, 73; advantages of irri¬ 
gated lands, 74; water supply 
for, 75; opportunity for, on the 
different continents, 75-80; of 
the Nile Valley, 106-118; see 
Lands, the utiwon ; Deserts . 


2 37 

Kentucky, wasted land in, 129. 

Lakes, creation of, 87 ; drainable, 
99, 100, 188; land, cultivation 
of unoccupied, 13; winning of, 
by irrigation and drainage, 17, 
87-100; see Soil. 

Lands, the unwon, 69-86. 

Landscape, aesthetic perception of 
the, 179-181. 

Landscape architects, 181-183. 

Lead, economic value of, 46, 63. 

Lime phosphate, deposits contain¬ 
ing, 135- 

Maintenance of the soil, 120- 

138. 

Mammals, lack of aesthetic sense 
in, 175 ; man’s relation to, 203. 

Man, civilized, his exhaustion of 
the stores of the earth, 2 ; primi¬ 
tive, makes no drain on the 
earth’s stores, 2; making of 
stone implements and of retain¬ 
ing vessels, 43, 44; permanence 
of, 11 ; increase in number, 12, 
13; the critical point in his re¬ 
lation to the earth, 120; the 
shape of his body in the past and 
in the future, 151-154 ; probable 
future changes in proportion in 
his body, 154 ; stirpiculture, 155; 
future changes in the intelli¬ 
gence of, 156; trend of, toward 
more intimate association of 
individual units, 157; future 
avoidance of disease tax, 158; 
his aesthetic sense, 176-182; the 
changes he has wrought in 
nature, 190-193; the changes he 
may work in the future, 193- 
208; his future relation to or¬ 
ganic life, 198; earth and, the 
last of, 209-227; the extent to 



Index 


238 

which he may be able to obtain 
control of the processes of his 
own body, 224; of the future, 
225; extension of his sympa¬ 
thies, 225, 226; his attitude to 
the earth, 228, 229. 

Mangroves, 92. 

Mercury, economic value of, 46, 65. 

Metals, increase in consumption 
of, 3,4; exhaustion of the, 42-68; 
relative importance of, in civili¬ 
zation, 45, 46. 

Meteorites, 219-221. 

Moon and planetoids, 222. 

Mosses, 95, 96. 

Mountains, 169. 

Nature, the future of, upon the 
earth, 190-208; the Oneness of, 
230, 231. 

Nile, the problem of the, 101-119; 
important part it has played, 102; 
the peculiar features of, 103, 
104; the alluvial plains of, 105; 
irrigation of the valley of, 79, 
106-118; the rise and fall of, 
in; storage of its flood, 114, 
115; power to be derived from, 
116, 117. 

Nitrates, 67. 

North America, its possible water- 
powers, 25; deposits of iron ore in, 
51-55; opportunity for irrigation 
in, 78-80; proportional part of, 
which will remain unchanged by 
man, 184. 

Ocean, see Sea. 

Ohio shale, use in production of 
oil, 39- 

Oil, rock, distribution of, 38, 39; 
production of, from carbonaceous 
shales, 39. 

Oxygen, in the air, 215-217. 


Pacific slope, possibilities of irri¬ 
gation on the, 83. 

Paroquets, 203. 

Peat, as a source of dynamic power, 
32; heat-giving value of, 32. 

Peat bogs, 96. 

Petroleum, increase in consumption 
of, 5; distribution of, 39. 

Pigeons, passenger, 202. 

Planetoids, and the moon, 222; 
and the earth, 223. 

Plants, protect the soil, 7 ; their 
action on rocks, 121; marine, 
140; see Vegetation. 

Plasmodiums, 194. 

Platinum, 65. 

Population, probable future in¬ 
crease of, 12, 13. 

Potash, sources of supply, 137. 

Power, advance in needs of dy¬ 
namic, 6, 20; the future of, 20-41; 
wind as a source of, 22; water¬ 
power, 23-28; tides as a source 
of, 28; from sea-waves, 30; de¬ 
rived from sun-rays refracted by 
lenses, 30; cannot be derived 
from the central heat of the 
earth, 30; obtained by burning 
the carbon in organic matter, 
31-41; wood has no value as a 
source of, 31; peat, 32; coal, 34 ; 
oil and gas, 35, 37-41 ; impor¬ 
tance of iron in, 47; to be de¬ 
rived from the Nile, 116, 117. 

Propagation of fishes, 143. 

Quaking bogs, 96. 

Rain, action of, on the surface of 
the soil, 8, 125, 127. 

Rainfall, probable diminution of, 
in the future, 163, 165. 

Reconciliation with the environ¬ 
ment, 159. 



Index 


Reservations, government, 184-188. 

Resources of the sea, 139-149. 

Rio Grande Valley, opportunity for 
irrigation in, 81. 

Rivers, valleys of, which may prove 
tillable, 94; economic interest of, 
101; scientific interest of, 102 ; 
their use for water-power, 188. 

Rocks, decay of, provides for re¬ 
newal of detritus, 8, 121. 

Romans, their lack of appreciation 
of the landscape, 180. 

Rutilius Numatianus, 180. 

Sahara, the, 114. 

Saltpetre, 67. 

Science, its work in maintaining 
the fertility of the soil, 19; the 
part of modern, 230; is now 
taught in fragmentary way, 231; 
the proper aim in teaching, 232. 

Sea, its surges as a source of dy¬ 
namic power, 30; resources of, 
139-149; elements entering into 
its composition, 139; plants of, 
140; animals of, 141; as a source 
of food supply, 142 ; other utili¬ 
ties to be obtained from, 142-146; 
marine birds, 147. 

Seals, 146. 

Silver, economic value of, 63. 

Slope, in relation to tillage, 127. 

Soda, sources of supply, 137. 

Soil, tillable, amount which may 
be won from mud flats, marshes, 
and swamps, 93; amount which 
may be won from moss bogs, 
98; amount which may be won 
from lakes, 99,100; in the valley 
of the Nile, 105, 106, 112-114; 
maintenance of, 120-138 ; is con¬ 
stantly slipping away, 120; for¬ 
mation of, 10, 121 ; a mere film 
on surface of rock, 122 ; problem 


2 39 

of returning to it the materials 
which are removed by cropping, 
124; sterilizing of, 124; protected 
by vegetation, 7, 125; action of 
the wind on, 125, 126; action of 
the rain on, 125, 127; sinful 
waste of, by man, 128 ; methods 
to prevent the destruction of, 
129 ; classification of fields, 130; 
fertilization of, 131-137 ; method 
of controlling the administration 
of, 138. 

Solipsists, 228. 

South America, irrigation in, 79; 
proportional part of, which will 
remain unchanged by man, 184. 

Species, elimination of, 194. 

Sphagnum, 95-97. 

Sterilizing of soil, 124. 

Stirpiculture, 155. 

Sulphur, economic value of, 66. 

Sulphuric acid, 66. 

Sun, source of dynamic energy, 21; 
rays of, refracted by lenses, as a 
source of dynamic power, 30; 
duration of its heat-giving power, 
209. 

Superphosphatics, as fertilizers, 
133- 

Temperature, interstellar, 218; 
see Heat. 

Termites, 201. 

Thorium, 65. 

Tide-mills, 28, 29. 

Tides as a source of dynamic 
energy, 28; and tidal action, 
211-214. 

Tillage, better methods of, needed, 
129; means pauperizing of the 
soil, 8-10, 137; see Soil. 

Tin, economic value of, 64. 

Transmutability of the elements, 

68 . 



240 


Index 


Travel, growth of the desire for, 
182. 

Underground store of wealth, 
exhaustion of, 3-7. 

United States, possibilities of 
irrigation in, 80-84. 

Upland bogs, 97. 

Vegetation, adjusts the process 
of renewal of detritus, 7,121; 
soil protected by, 125; see 
Plants. 

Vessels, retaining, 44,45. 

Virgil, 180. 

Volcanoes, 170. 

Vulcan, asteroid, 221. 


Wasps, 201. 

Waste of the soil by man, 8, 128. 

Water, as a source of dynamic 
energy, 23-28. 

Water-power, amount of, possible 
on the different continents, 24- 
27- 

Waters, land from the, 87-100. 

Weeds, 191. 

White Mountains, the, 186. 

Wind, as a source of dynamic 
energy, 21-23 > action of, on the 
surface of the soil, 125, 126. 

Wood has no value as a source of 
dynamic power, 31, 32. 

Zinc, economic value of, 64. 



























































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